i had to teach a friend basic algebra in college because we needed it for an electrical engineering class. he had somehow been placed directly into calculus in high school and just sort of faked it. i had to teach him real basic order of operations stuff. i had to teach him FOIL. it was unbelievable
which makes it extra super cool that it underlies all machine learning, since no one wants to learn it enough to get some intuition. LEARN TO THINK IN BASES AND EIGENVECTORS, grow UP
A lot of it has to do with how they put it into the sequence of classes in unis. A lot of times it's placed after calc 2 in sequence, which is a big roadblock for people, however I don't recall needing much of any calc in it. You could have easily introduced it as a freshmen course and been fine.
I haven't taken a math class in 20 years and I faked my way through enough linear algebra to work at an AI company, it's really straightforward and probably the easiest thing to learn as an adult.
I can't wait for the quantum hype where everyone and their aunties and uncles who don't understand eigenvectors will be quantum experts and companies will try to inset quantum in all technical problems.
Comments
some pals of mine wrote this quantum computing curriculum for high schoolers and it teaches basic linear algebra. So what’s the real issue here?
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.00282#page15