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Does anybody have any experience with How to Prove It? by Velleman? Recently I was thinking of starting on it, but I'm not sure about the level of commitment necessary.
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So, you've made all that effort, how does it help you in your new role as a data scientist? Is there anything you do now that requires "mathematical maturity"? Or is it something that can be learned much quicker on as needed basis?
There are a lot of charlatans in the Data Science space who lack the necessary mathematical background for their roles. For me it was necessary to get a rigorous understanding of probability theory, and applied probability theory is basically what mathematical statistics is about. My background was CS and software so R, Python, data visualisation and ML operationalization is by and large the easy part of Data Science…
Do any of you all have some tips for understanding mathematical notation? I feel this is often poorly explained, and it feels like a language all its own that just does not speak to me. I did pretty well in calculus, but I still don't really understand what the dx was supposed to represent and in reality I was just really good at pattern matching when it wasn't supposed to be there anymore. I try to read papers now a…
You can take a look at it, at the Internet Archive,
https://archive.org/details/HogbenMathematicsForTheMillion/m...
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That is extremely inspiring. Can you speak more to how you went from industry to a community college to getting into and completing a PhD program? Did you quit your job to return back to school? What area did you end up specializing in and what do you do now?
Long and short, I got sick of the tedium in web development, quit my job and went back to school. The dot-com bubble had just burst, and I had been taking occasional classes including a very inspirational data structures course which planted the seed with formal proofs. After I went back to school, I tutored in the math study center to pay the bills, which really helped cement not just the learning but also the notio…
Interestingly this is similar to what my two advisors (one from the math department and one from CS) suggested to me. It would be easier to do the math I like in a CS department than it would be to do the CS I like in a math department. Do you feel like math departments are more conservative when it comes to working outside the discipline?
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Yep, brilliant.org + the first book from minireference.com are what OP needs.
I found that the community on brilliant.org can be quite toxic. I was a member for awhile, but quit due to the people on the site.
Please do email me silas [at] brilliant.org, so I can figure out which failure mode you hit and evaluate if it has improved at all since you quit.
In addition, as others have noted, our courses have no community aspect to them at all.
Do any of you all have some tips for understanding mathematical notation? I feel this is often poorly explained, and it feels like a language all its own that just does not speak to me. I did pretty well in calculus, but I still don't really understand what the dx was supposed to represent and in reality I was just really good at pattern matching when it wasn't supposed to be there anymore. I try to read papers now a…
Any statement in math is meant to be directly translatable to human language. You should be able to read it out loud in English and know exactly what you mean when you say it.
Unfortunately, sometimes math uses awful notation. For example, df/dx. This is a case where df doesn't mean anything (or at least it's not normally well-defined), and dx doesn't mean anything either (same comment). But the notation as a whole means something. If we write g = df/dx, then we can understand that g is a function whose input is x and output is the slope of f at x.
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The books are called "Essential Mathematics" 1 and 2. They correspond to these modules. http://www.openuniversity.edu/courses/modules/mst124 http://www.openuniversity.edu/courses/modules/mst125 Second-hand OU books are usually bought from https://www.universitybooksearch.co.uk/
Could you provide the direct links for the books used in: MST123, MST124, MST125? I could not find them in your links.
1: https://www.thriftbooks.com/browse/?b.search=MST124#b.s=most...
As someone who dropped out of highscool after 10th grade and never went to university/college one great way I've found for learning mathematics without any foundational basis is trying to learn CG/3D programming. I always felt like maths was too abstract to keep me engaged, but when the output of your work is immediately observable visually it becomes a lot more engaging. There's just something so much more satisfyin…