| ▲ | RedCinnabar a day ago | |
Maybe I should’ve been more clear: what I meant is that these programmers-oriented resources are all about applications…maybe a bit too much. For instance, In this book I cannot find the algebraic structure of vector spaces, theorems about how certain linear operators such as the kernel or the image led to subspaces (which is a very important result) or a proper introduction to the spectral theorem, for both Euclidean and Hermitian spaces (which also allows you to introduce some nice functional analysis). | ||
| ▲ | renyicircle 13 hours ago | parent [-] | |
I get where you're coming from but linear algebra is one of the most applied branches of mathematics out there. It's easy to visualize and easy to teach the computational side of it so it makes sense that some books focus more on that and these are popular among people whose main interest is in how to apply it - like programmers. You don't need to know what a ring is to learn how to multiply numbers. I wouldn't say this one is programmers-oriented either - it was posted to HN, sure, but maths and physics students could benefit from some visualizations too as a supplement to a more rigorous text. As for the things you mentioned as omitted, I think if you want to do a complete treatment you have to introduce more mathematical prerequisites which limits the audience of your book. For a mathematician, I'd say classical linear algebra in itself is not particularly interesting - it's very well-behaved and pretty much "solved". What you care about is how it relates to other structures (groups, modules, fields), how it develops into other topics (functional analysis) and how it's used to study other objects (representation theory, tangent spaces of manifolds). In isolation, most of what's left is the computational aspect which is what non-mathematicians mostly care about. | ||