Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: How can I learn to read mathematical notation?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 148 posts

Re: Ask HN: How can I learn to read mathematical notation?

#81

Post by stillbourne »

eldavido wrote: post #32

I love how there are these two parallel threads going in HNville: (1) COLLEGE SUCKS BURN IT DOWN and (2) "I'd like to learn complex things like machine learning and math that take more than reading 5 blog posts to master, how do I do it"? Sometimes this place just cracks me up. I honestly think the answer is pretty simple: go to college. It doesn't have to be expensive. Take a community college course in calculus or…

Don't listen to this asshat. There are 2 great resources for self education on Math. https://www.encyclopediaofmath.org/index.php/Main_Page and http://people.math.sfu.ca/~cbm/aands/abramowitz_and_stegun.p... Have a nice day.

Re: Ask HN: How can I learn to read mathematical notation?

#82

Post by chapium »

elhudy wrote: post #69
eldavido wrote: post #32

I love how there are these two parallel threads going in HNville: (1) COLLEGE SUCKS BURN IT DOWN and (2) "I'd like to learn complex things like machine learning and math that take more than reading 5 blog posts to master, how do I do it"? Sometimes this place just cracks me up. I honestly think the answer is pretty simple: go to college. It doesn't have to be expensive. Take a community college course in calculus or…

>What you shouldn't do is try to self-study by reading a book. My experience has been that this is exactly how college math works; you pay for self-study. The professor reads directly out of a book (in poor English), or off of pre-made slides provided with the book, for 2-4 hours per week, and then you are left to do the problems from the book on your own time. Class populations are so large that if everyone had aske…

Smaller colleges are not like this.

Re: Ask HN: How can I learn to read mathematical notation?

#83

Post by starbeast »

I run into the same problem, am much better at understanding maths stated as code than in mathematical notation.

3blue1brown's animated maths channel is pretty good. - https://www.3blue1brown.com/

Khan Academy's maths section covers a lot of stuff - https://www.khanacademy.org/math

math.stackexchange is excellent for specific questions - https://math.stackexchange.com/

One thing that works for me is to try and find something stated both in code and in maths notation, then you can work out one from the other.

Re: Ask HN: How can I learn to read mathematical notation?

#84

Post by newprint »

I'm going through the books - 1.How to Prove It: A Structured Approach; 2.Mathematical Proofs: A Transition to Advanced Mathematics The are very different books on how to read/write proofs, but complement each other nicely. On top of that, I'm doing though few elementary logic and set theory books, they also have what I would call "barebone proofs", since logic/set theory don't even deal with numbers. My goal a very different from yours, in my case I want to learn real and complex analysis and move to quantum physics, but nevertheless, two books mentioned above are helping me a lot.

Re: Ask HN: How can I learn to read mathematical notation?

#85

Post by bllguo »

You have to spend time to build your mathematical foundations. You have to get familiar with it through problems and exercises. I don't think there are shortcuts.

If you don't have the foundations it's wasteful to spend time trying to work out academic papers and such. Bite the bullet and start from the beginning, it'll pay off over time. It will also allow you to go much farther. Even if you manage to 'understand' what a paper is saying, without the background you won't be able to do much other than replicate it.

Re: Ask HN: How can I learn to read mathematical notation?

#86

Post by eldavido »

stillbourne wrote: post #81
eldavido wrote: post #32

I love how there are these two parallel threads going in HNville: (1) COLLEGE SUCKS BURN IT DOWN and (2) "I'd like to learn complex things like machine learning and math that take more than reading 5 blog posts to master, how do I do it"? Sometimes this place just cracks me up. I honestly think the answer is pretty simple: go to college. It doesn't have to be expensive. Take a community college course in calculus or…

Don't listen to this asshat. There are 2 great resources for self education on Math. https://www.encyclopediaofmath.org/index.php/Main_Page and http://people.math.sfu.ca/~cbm/aands/abramowitz_and_stegun.p... Have a nice day.

Happy Thanksgiving to you, too.

Re: Ask HN: How can I learn to read mathematical notation?

#87

Post by ukulele »

stillbourne wrote: post #81
eldavido wrote: post #32

I love how there are these two parallel threads going in HNville: (1) COLLEGE SUCKS BURN IT DOWN and (2) "I'd like to learn complex things like machine learning and math that take more than reading 5 blog posts to master, how do I do it"? Sometimes this place just cracks me up. I honestly think the answer is pretty simple: go to college. It doesn't have to be expensive. Take a community college course in calculus or…

Don't listen to this asshat. There are 2 great resources for self education on Math. https://www.encyclopediaofmath.org/index.php/Main_Page and http://people.math.sfu.ca/~cbm/aands/abramowitz_and_stegun.p... Have a nice day.

This would be more convincing without the first sentence.

Re: Ask HN: How can I learn to read mathematical notation?

#88

Post by greenyoda »

admax88q wrote: post #72
elhudy wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What you shouldn't do is try to self-study by reading a book. My experience has been that this is exactly how college math works; you pay for self-study. The professor reads directly out of a book (in poor English), or off of pre-made slides provided with the book, for 2-4 hours per week, and then you are left to do the problems from the book on your own time. Class populations are so large that if everyone had aske…

There are other benefits beyond being able to ask questions. Tests and deadlines provide motivation to do the actual work. Having a curriculum means that the content is laid out in a logical order that the professor believes should be achievable. There is a stupid amount of information out there. Breaking it down into a progression that students can follow in order to learn and understand it is incredibly important.…

> Having a curriculum means that the content is laid out in a logical order that the professor believes should be achievable.

> There is a stupid amount of information out there. Breaking it down into a progression that students can follow in order to learn and understand it is incredibly important.

You can get all this from a textbook. The curricula of most undergraduate math classes are based textbooks anyway. Many math textbooks even have a roadmap in the preface that tells you which chapters can be skipped for shorter versions of a course, which ones discuss advanced topics, etc.

> Tests and deadlines provide motivation to do the actual work.

The person who asked the original question already seems to have the motivation to learn math for a specific purpose. They're not a random undergrad who has to complete a math course just because it's a requirement for graduation and never expects to use the knowledge.

Also, the downside of studying based on arbitrary deadlines is that if it takes you even slightly longer than average to understand the material, you fall progressively further behind the class. If you learn at your own pace, you can study a topic until you really understand it.

Re: Ask HN: How can I learn to read mathematical notation?

#89

Post by UncleEntity »

eldavido wrote: post #32

I love how there are these two parallel threads going in HNville: (1) COLLEGE SUCKS BURN IT DOWN and (2) "I'd like to learn complex things like machine learning and math that take more than reading 5 blog posts to master, how do I do it"? Sometimes this place just cracks me up. I honestly think the answer is pretty simple: go to college. It doesn't have to be expensive. Take a community college course in calculus or…

I went to college and took a sum total of two math classes but have learned enough to reason out the many papers that don't have (pseudo) code but 'complex mathematical notation' -- which seems like almost all of them.

https://github.com/Jam3/math-as-code was helpful...

Post reply on HN