[_lzell]

| everyone who cares about understanding the world.

Those fluent in math really need to drop this egocentric view. If you can't do matrix manipulations you aren't curious about the world? Give me a break. The breadth of topics that yield understanding of various parts of our world is vast. Do you have an early university understanding of history, politics, math, sociology, psychology, economics, law, capitalism, etc. etc. etc.

[SonOfLilit]

If you don't grok matrix manipulations (which are a very simple thing to understand: matrices are linear transformations and matrix multiplication is composition of linear transformations; for some reason this is only taught as a theorem, not as the first lesson in Linear Algebra), you're missing on a really great tool that helps us a lot in understanding almost every kind of large scale process precisely. Without this tool, we'd be back to the 18th century in math, physics, engineering, computer science...

It's pretty high up there in "list of things to learn if you're curious about the world". Of course, so are history, economics, etc'

[rahrahrah]

I didn't say you shouldn't learn those things, did I?