Singular Value Decomposition

#1

Post by tomrod » Wed, Feb 23, 2011, 5:09 PM UTC

Singular Value Decomposition
en.wikipedia.org

Re: Singular Value Decomposition

#2

Post by Adrock » Wed, Feb 23, 2011, 6:24 PM UTC

It's not obvious to me why this is so important to programmers. Can someone explain?

Re: Singular Value Decomposition

#3

Post by gte910h » Wed, Feb 23, 2011, 6:29 PM UTC

Adrock wrote: post #2

It's not obvious to me why this is so important to programmers. Can someone explain?

You use this to project and move objects to different orientations, shapes and sizes. So if you're doing animation, UI programming or graphics, it's very useful.

If you're doing analysis, you can use SVD to isolate independent forces, and to quantify the relationships of dependent forces.

Some compressions/specification techniques rely on it.

Basically, it's very important to know how to do for some, vaguely informative for others, and very important for yet another group.

Re: Singular Value Decomposition

#4

Post by petegrif » Wed, Feb 23, 2011, 6:30 PM UTC

depends on the style of language a) imperative 1+1 = 2 (increment) b) functional f(x) = c) object = if you can't see it, it doesn't matter how much math you know

Re: Singular Value Decomposition

#5

Post by tbrownaw » Wed, Feb 23, 2011, 6:37 PM UTC

What about algorithmic complexity and induction/deduction?

Re: Singular Value Decomposition

#6

Post by tjpick » Wed, Feb 23, 2011, 6:44 PM UTC

I would have picked these:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Morgans_laws

Re: Singular Value Decomposition

#7

Post by kunjaan » Wed, Feb 23, 2011, 6:53 PM UTC

These kinds of posts just open an endless and meaningless debate.

For example, why not list rules from boolean logic? Why don't we have concept of induction? I use tree concepts more often than I use SVD.

Re: Singular Value Decomposition

#8

Post by edge17 » Wed, Feb 23, 2011, 6:56 PM UTC

i'm going to go with the 80-20 rule as the most important math concept a programmer can learn

Re: Singular Value Decomposition

#9

Post by ha-kn » Wed, Feb 23, 2011, 7:00 PM UTC

My brain exploded trying to read the original post, and De Morgans laws seem like someone sense to anyone who has ever had to code a conditional. I can't help but feel there's a bit of "Mathematic elitism" in this post, and I really disagree with it. I struggle to understand why this concept is "the most important" to programmers, yet I consider myself a pretty solid coder.

Re: Singular Value Decomposition

#10

Post by rabidsnail » Wed, Feb 23, 2011, 7:02 PM UTC

gte910h wrote: post #3

Adrock wrote: post #2

It's not obvious to me why this is so important to programmers. Can someone explain?

You use this to project and move objects to different orientations, shapes and sizes. So if you're doing animation, UI programming or graphics, it's very useful. If you're doing analysis, you can use SVD to isolate independent forces, and to quantify the relationships of dependent forces. Some compressions/specification techniques rely on it. Basically, it's very important to know how to do for some, vaguely informat…

For UI programming and animation transformation matrices (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformation_matrix) (plus some simple calculus) are really all you need.