Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by vivekseth 2139 days ago
I learned this concept by watching 3blue1brown's series on Linear Algebra: https://www.3blue1brown.com/essence-of-linear-algebra-page

Would highly recommend. I feel like Grant's videos gave me a better understanding of Linear Algebra than the course I took in college.

5 comments

The 3b1b videos are really high quality, but I don't find them particularly useful when learning new material. The fancy animations distract and mesmerize, I slip into a mode of being entertained, becoming mostly a waste of time.

For subjects I've already learned however they can be useful for gaining new visual perspectives.

On the topic of learning rotation matrices / linear algebra in video games, I'd strongly recommend the Handmade Hero youtube channel. Casey explains these subjects at length in multiple videos, using plain chalkboard-style drawings I personally find far less distracting.

They give the "feeling of learning", which is worth only a little. They also give the motivation to learn, which is invaluable.
Second on Handmade Hero. It's great.
I would heavily second this. I would also recommend, for those who are interested in computational linear algebra, going through fast.ai's course when you finish 3blue1brown: https://github.com/fastai/numerical-linear-algebra/blob/mast...
Could you expand a bit on why this is a good course? Lots of great linear algebra stuff out there, why this one?
Sure! The short version is that in this course, as in all of their other courses, I find they do a near-perfect job of contextualizing information as they teach it.

To expand a bit more, I usually don't enjoy resources that emphasize how "practical" they are, because I almost never "learn" anything from them. They teach procedures, not concepts.

This course, and fast.ai's other courses, are different in that they still approach the subject matter in ways that feel tangible and "real world," but they are doing so in a way that reveals and helps you learn the underlying concepts—it's just done in a top-down manner.

YMMV of course, this has just been my experience.

Blue Brown is really a great resource. His visualization library looks really nice too. He clearly spends a lot of time thinking about how to explain things. A lot of colleges could learn a lot about how to teach from people like him.
This series taught me all sorts of things I never groked from years of university education.