I wish we had resources like this when I was on the university.
Immersive Linear Algebra – textbook with fully interactive figures (2015)
41–50 of 78 posts
Re: Immersive Linear Algebra – textbook with fully interactive figures (2015)
#42on a tangent, I was just reading https://medium.com/@dominikus/the-end-of-interactive-visuali... in short (over simplified, my take): interactive visualizations are dead because nobody interacts with them. wondering if this holds here as well. Can't find the reference anymore, but there were also papers in educational sciences that interactive books usually don't increase comprehension of kids (they just play with th…
For me this gets to a deeper point. While there are probably some people who innately understand tough mathematical or scientific concepts, it's been my experience that learning is largely about spending enough time struggling diligently with the material until you've built a robust and correct mental model of it. Then on to exercises to see if your model breaks or holds up when strained. If you approach interactive aids and videos and images with this mindset, they can be very helpful.
I can also clearly remember times when this was not my approach, and in those times, pictures were just a lot of time saved because I didn't have to read text that otherwise would have been there.
Re: Immersive Linear Algebra – textbook with fully interactive figures (2015)
#43Although the focus with this book is with the fully interactive figures, I'm more impressed that ALL of the book is available for free. I'm constantly seeing more people coming out with books for free or just a passive donation link. This makes me immensely happy seeing as how they're leveraging the available free resources (Latex, CC-BY-SA content, free software for graphics) to make more resources available for fre…
> Although the focus with this book is with the fully interactive figures, I'm more impressed that ALL of the book is available for free.
That was exactly my first thought. "Wait a minute, this is an entire textbook, with all the work, and the prior experience, hiding in plain site behind cool interactivity."
Re: Immersive Linear Algebra – textbook with fully interactive figures (2015)
#44Last year, i saw the videos by 3Blue1Brown and inspired by it went on to read some of the standard text books like linear algebra application by Strang. I had seen the Strang videos earlier but somehow did not follow it through. This time however my perspective was changed. I was approaching the subject through the lens of intuition and simplicity. Wherever i found something challenging, i waited for the next day to…
> the difficulty was in my rigidness in understanding
At what point did you realize this? Like, could you provide a specific example of a topic you thought was hard at first but later came back to and realized was all about the intuition?
Re: Immersive Linear Algebra – textbook with fully interactive figures (2015)
#45If you're interested in more great animations for a visual understanding of linear algebra, I can't recommend 3Blue1Brown's "Essence of Linear Algebra" series on Youtube highly enough. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDPD3MizzM2x...
Holy shit. I wish I'd had access to these videos during my Mattix Algebra (I think it was called) course in undergrad. I feel like my lack of truly understanding LA has somewhat impaired my grasp of some of the other topics covered in CS undergrad and grad school.
Re: Immersive Linear Algebra – textbook with fully interactive figures (2015)
#46This looks great! Could some of you share other nice books and video series covering core CS math basics?
Re: Immersive Linear Algebra – textbook with fully interactive figures (2015)
#47If you like this, you might be interested in /r/explorables, a subreddit filled with interactive stuff:
Re: Immersive Linear Algebra – textbook with fully interactive figures (2015)
#48Can anyone hack this and make a PDF book?
Doesn't that defeat the point of intractability?
Interactivity maybe, intractability is not having the property of being tractable. For an algorithm, this means that its performance can not be described in polynomials. But your point is still valid, a pdf does not support animations, thus a pdf would be useless.
Re: Immersive Linear Algebra – textbook with fully interactive figures (2015)
#49Jaw dropped. This is exactly what I needed to get some progress with my shader learning :)
You might also like https://thebookofshaders.com
Re: Immersive Linear Algebra – textbook with fully interactive figures (2015)
#50on a tangent, I was just reading https://medium.com/@dominikus/the-end-of-interactive-visuali... in short (over simplified, my take): interactive visualizations are dead because nobody interacts with them. wondering if this holds here as well. Can't find the reference anymore, but there were also papers in educational sciences that interactive books usually don't increase comprehension of kids (they just play with th…
Thank you for the link. I learned from it.
I am the author of a widely-used LA text, and have considered adding interactive stuff. But there is a tradeoff. For one thing, it locks you to online, and despite the claims of our IT people, my correspondents (mostly self-learners) do not want online, they want print or PDF (as do I, since the appearance that LaTeX gives me is important to me).
For another, the tech has in the recent past changed so fast that maintaining the interactives would be a significant job. I don't mind learning JS to do something good but tying myself to many hours a year responding to bug reports from people on obscure platforms, or using IE6, is not a good use of my life energy.
Finally, I had a colleague, a complex analyst, try Visual Complex Analysis and he reported that students did not get it. He is very sober, very caring, very reliable. This starts to make sense of his report.