[luddypants]

Can you suggest any good reads which incorporate the history & motivation of linear algebra? I have had some experience with the common text books, but never put much effort into incorporating it into the way I think, precisely because it did not seem worth my time to just memorize methods without much context.

[sedachv]

I recently enjoyed Bashmakova and Smirnova's The beginnings and evolution of algebra. It covers the development of algebra from Babylonian math to group theory. One of the valuable things it does is cover the evolution of notation for mathematical problems. Now next time someone complains that "Prefix is hard! Infix is natural!" I can throw this book at them.

[sdenton4]

'Proofs and refutations' is a fantastic book about the process of mathematical exploration, whose primary worked example ('What is a polytope? And what does Euler's Formula mean?') ends up being a non-obvious translation of geometry into linear algebra. It's a really wonderful read, and will give a bit of a sense of how mathematicians think about linear algebra, in a way that most textbooks don't.