121–130 of 268 posts
About a year ago my wife and I made the joint decision to get her into college for a bachelor's degree in either English or computer science. Here in Finland, university admissions are based around how well you did on various end of school exams, and she fortunately did quite well on all of them a decade ago - except for math. She bombed math due to health and family problems as a teenager decimating her ability to p…
I’m a thirty-something with an arts degree who decided to learn math. Basically I was tired of reading popular science and being fed metaphors to understand concepts. I wanted to “see” it for myself. I spent time online at Khan Academy and friends for a year or so on and off. It was fine but meandering? So I enrolled in community college! It’s great. I have a clearer path, immediate feedback, teachers, and an obligat…
> working toward a bachelor of science in physics. Thats cool, I kind of want to do that. But also Im stuck with wondering, I put all this work into that, what do I do at the end?
and there is also OpenStax.org [1] which releases free public books on different subjects including... you guessed it... math !
Go check it out ! But maybe for some people, spending money is a necessity because it motivates them to finish the courses. It happens.
I tried math academy for this exact purpose, but I had to give up because it didn't let me test out of lessons that I was already good at (Similar to how duolingo would allow you to do). So I ended up wasting a lot of time sitting through all the exercises which I didn't need.
The "math" used in ML/AI papers is usually just a sort of 'whiteboard math' which is a domain-specific mishmash of linear algebra, calculus, set theory and statistics. If you could find a book just going through the relevant bits you wouldnt really have to "learn math again", it can be translated into english straightforwardly -- very very few ML papers relevant to industry have extended proofs, etc. that require eg.…
So... basically an ad for Math Academy? How about some free resources like Khan Academy?
That's basically what it is. There is nothing to learn from this post other than "smash that beta sign-up button". Has anyone tried that course? Is it any good?
Math Academy is much more dense and on-point that Khan's. You don't have to sit through 15 minutes of video when 2 minutes worth of text explanation does it.
It uses spaced repetition for topics that you aren't good at, and for recently learned subjects.
The topic dependency tree and automatic progressing to "unlocked" topics is obvious in retrospect, but here it's done very cleanly and unobtrusively.
The initial evaluation test is worth its weight in gold. It eliminates the need to grind through things that you already know, but still covers any gaps.
I had kids on Khan for few weeks and it was a hassle. The pace was too slow, too much time sunk into trivialities and they were bored most of the time. With Math Academy they sit down, they do their 20-30 min of focused hands-on effort and they are done for the day.
There's a lot of domain specific stuff too that a straight up math major won't understand.
About a year ago my wife and I made the joint decision to get her into college for a bachelor's degree in either English or computer science. Here in Finland, university admissions are based around how well you did on various end of school exams, and she fortunately did quite well on all of them a decade ago - except for math. She bombed math due to health and family problems as a teenager decimating her ability to p…
Worth calling out the key observation: it takes practice, and lots of it (for most people, anyway) to get good at math. Just reading about it does zilch.
If OP still wants to learn the mathematical foundation of transformers, I built a free alternative learning tool: https://afaik.io/nebula?mode=nebula&category=blueprint&id=ed... It's also based on an underlying knowledge graph, connecting concepts across various subjects like maths, machine learning, physics, etc. You can check the graph for transformer here: https://afaik.io/nebula?category=brickset&id=VLlOnZLl&mode…
I find the concept of "underlying knowledge graph" interesting. What does it mean? I assume it means such a graph connects the topics together as "pre-requisites". To understand A you need to already understand B and C, and to understand B you need to understand D and ... etc. But the thing about such a graph is that really it must be a tree, not just a directed graph. Why? Because there cannot be cycles in it. If to…
It may be a tree. But it must be a DAG (directed acyclic graph).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
FYI this is the guy that wrote the comment you replied to: https://www.justinmath.com He's true math nerd, and definitely not a marketer. In fact, I don't think a single marketer works at the company. It's a bootstrapped labor of love and I've been following their journey for almost a decade. I get the skepticism, but some things are legit.
I'm sure there are math nerds that work in marketing. Your whole blog post comes across as an advert, that may not have been your intention but that's what it looks like to me, legit or not.