[michael_h]

Linear algebra is incredibly useful and, when you know how to spot its shape, is just about everywhere.

A (long) while ago, one of my coworkers spent months putting together an enormous framework for processing some data. It was really well done - simple API, good error messages, verification at various steps, and reliable results. It was a little slow though. It was pushing 1 hour to complete a cycle, which was bumping up against other processes. A senior guy had a look at it, noticed that we could encode the data as a vector and apply some linear transformations to it, then decode afterwards. Thanks to lucky cache hits and BLAS, it took about 25 seconds to run.

[sotojuan]

I see. I think you hit an interesting point with that story: You may not need math to write an application, but it helps a lot when making it efficient and knowing which abstractions to use.

Personally, I'm going to spend some time after graduation teaching myself math. I think it can be incredibly helpful, even if it's just to improve my thinking.

[amelius]

I can highly recommend Gilbert Strang's Linear Algebra course, available as video lecture series [1]

[1] http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06-linear-algebra-...