

Ask HN: Linear algebra and web software? - HackrNwsDesignr

I am curious where linear algebra has applications to web software engineering.
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mindcrime
Depends on what you mean by "web software engineering." Really it's almost a
useless term, since a web-frontend can be the front-end for almost any sort of
system. The question really should just be "where does linear algebra have
applications to software engineering?" in a general sense.

Pedantry & ranting aside, the obvious place is anything to do with machine
learning / text mining. If processing large amounts of text and searching for
things within, or based on, that text, you may well wind up using algorithms
that involve linear algebra.

One of the Mahout project founders speaks fairly often in the Triangle area,
at User Group meetings and such, and he always seems to mention Linear Algebra
in his talks. There's a reason for that.

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RiderOfGiraffes
Google? The Page Rank algorithm is basically Linear Algebra.

ButI think you're asking the wrong question. You're doing the equivalent of a
14-year-old saying "When am I ever going to need this?" Sometimes the benefits
are much more nebulous and intangible - they affect the way you think, and the
way you approach problems.

Most programming doesn't use advanced math, but advanced math helps you do the
programming.

(Note - all the above personal opinion, and I don't have specific studies and
citations to back it up)

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clyfe
Making sense of large corpus of text via machine learning, say .. SVM which
stands on top of linear algebra (computing inner products in an isomorphic
space of bigger dimension via kernel functions) (Hillary Mason working at
bit.ly gives talks about this stuff <http://www.hilarymason.com/> )

Data mining, a lot of which boils down to multidimensional exploratory
statistics needs linear algebra.

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roversoccer18
Advance memory allocation uses linear algebra. Also graphics and shadows in
game use transpose matrices. A lot of algorithms use linear combination and
other linear algebra.

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HackrNwsDesignr
Thanks guys for those comments, quite helpful.

