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

Ask HN: What kind of math do you study in your free time?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 97 posts

Re: Ask HN: What kind of math do you study in your free time?

#51

Post by jll29 »

The topics that resonate with me the most are graph theory and probability. Incidentally, they are also the most useful for my day job. Graphs are such a beautiful and intuitive concept, it is amazing; basic probability is unbelievably useful for general problem solving, making decisions, modeling the world; both have been written about a lot, yet there is so much more to discover and apply.

Things I'd love to read about if I had more time are: topology (knots are weird interesting things), meta-mathematics (Gödelization and all that, read Gödel, Escher, Bach if you'd like to wet your appetite), paraconsistent logic (how to contain inconsitencies in systems of logic so that they don't become arbitrary - as from contradiction, anything follows). Digesting maths requires a _lot_ of time, wish I could be a student again to sit in whatever lecture that sounds interesting.

As a kid, I loved reading about history of maths; many discovery stories made me become a scientist (applied computer science researcher), and I still enjoy reading about it (also biographies or even mathematically related fiction e.g. The Solitude of Prime Numbers).

Re: Ask HN: What kind of math do you study in your free time?

#53

Post by mistrial9 »

certainly some statistics thoery, when following any MachineLearning core.. (not big on DeepLearning here, all the other ones) Small bits of 'Understanding Machine Learning: From Theory to Algorithms'

Some clustering theory.. some computer vision components, including segmentation methods

Some "data mining" approaches, which are sets and stats, basically..

Re: Ask HN: What kind of math do you study in your free time?

#54

Post by Koshkin »

spekcular wrote: post #48
xyzal wrote: post #11

Bartosz Milewski's lectures on category theory are great. Also, the accompanying book is well written (and free)! lectures -> https://www.youtube.com/user/DrBartosz book -> https://github.com/hmemcpy/milewski-ctfp-pdf

What practical applications does it present for programmers? I've looked at this a bit and it just seems like a regular category theory book.

Sometimes it is helpful to really understand what the hell you are actually doing when you write code (design patterns, data types and all). Otherwise, not much (unless you write Haskell, that is.)

Re: Ask HN: What kind of math do you study in your free time?

#55

Post by Koshkin »

LolWolf wrote: post #27

Not sure if it counts as "free time" as I study math for a living :) but optimization theory is always on my list. If you like Strang's new book, I think you'll be quite partial to Boyd's VMLS [0] which is (in my admittedly horrible opinion) even more clear and practical and serves as an incredibly good and basic introduction to both linear algebra and basic optimization (via least squares). It assumes nothing more t…

> I study math for a living

You get paid for studying math?

Re: Ask HN: What kind of math do you study in your free time?

#56

Post by Koshkin »

auntienomen wrote: post #44
tgb wrote: post #34

Related: do people have good recommendations of "casual" math books for more advanced topics? I.e. ones that an educated reader with a background in math can read through in one pass (unlike most textbooks) but nonetheless have real math in them? (And has fun exercises!) I can start with some. Feynman's Lectures on Computing. Scott Aaronson's Quantum Computing Since Democritus (though it assumes some background knowl…

Roger Penrose' book _The Road to Reality_ is pretty good in this respect. It's a little skewed towards geometry (instead of, e.g., Hilbert spaces and operator algebra), but hey, what do you expect from Penrose.

Heh, this one is only for casual reading if you are already well-versed in the material. (This is a weird book - the author tends to dwell on simple things and then to rush through complex topics. Not recommended for an uninitiated. His later book, Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy, is more accessible but is primarily focused on discussing physics.)

Re: Ask HN: What kind of math do you study in your free time?

#60

Post by dorchadas »

I'm currently working through books on Linear Algebra (Friedman), Real Analysis (Bloch) and Abstract Algebra (Pinter) with guided help from a math PhD I found via Reddit/Discord. It's going great, and I'm getting feedback on my proofs and learning quite a lot.

I studied physics in undergrad, and am now a math/science teacher, but I feel I missed my true calling in deciding on physics over math; it's just so much more fun, in my opinion. I'd love to maybe eventually do an online math bachelors and then get a masters in it later (or skip the bachelors and get a masters), but all that will depend on if I decide to shift out of teaching or not.

Post reply on HN