[hadjian]

So strange. It was the best book I’ve read about the topic. It’s been a while, but I don’t recall anything not presented in the right order. Going from linear equations to a geometric interpretation of the rows, then to linear combination of the columns. Then Gauss-Seidel to LRU.

I liked his approach of “ideas first, rigor later”. I think after reading this book, you can easily grab a book with more formalism, if you feel lacking rigor.

I’m interested to understand where you felt the order was wrong?

[nerusskyhigh]

A bit everywhere. One thing that really bothered me is that you have to wait until chapter 3 to introduce the notion of vector spaces. I know that it is not an easy concept to grasp, but once you manage to understand it a lot of previous things become trivial.

When I was first introduced to the idea of solving linear equations, we already had the idea of space vectors and basis, so solving a system of equations was just an application of finding the coefficients of the linear combination.

> I liked his approach of “ideas first, rigor later”. I think after reading this book, you can easily grab a book with more formalism if you feel lacking rigor.

This sentence made me think. Maybe there was a disconnect between my experience (Physics background, bottom-up approach) and the one taught in the course (Data science for Linguistic, top-down). Each time I tried to use the notion and examples I had in mind with the students I found myself hitting a wall because they had not covered the topics yet.

[hadjian]

That sounds about right. I read the book and watched the lectures after I graduated. And it was just fun.

The thing is that the ideas stuck and I was very grateful for that.

But we can be lucky that there are so many approaches out there to pick from.

[nerusskyhigh]

You probably already know about them, but just in case: have you watched 3b1b's videos about Linear Algebra? Those did open my mind and improved my understanding of linear algebra.

[hadjian]

Oh yes, 3b1b is my favorite. All of them, but especially Fourier series.

[yakubin]

I tried Strang in uni and it was about the worst linear algebra book I tried. Kostrikin on the other hand was perfect — he struck the right balance between geometric intuition and formal rigour.