
Help Advance the World with Advanced Linear Algebra - MaysonL
https://hornraiser.utexas.edu/project/16114
======
IgniteTheSun
Why EdX and not OpenCourseWare (OCW)? Before Coursera, a lot was freely
available without having to go through the agreements and overhead required to
access via a MOOC like EdX.

Harvard and UC Berkeley used to have an excellent OCW sites but they migrated
a lot of content to EdX or elsewhere and removed it from their OCW sites.
Stanford also took a lot of stuff off of their multiple OCW type of sites and
moved it to Coursera or elsewhere. Thankfully, MIT still kept much of their
stuff on their OCW site even after adding it to EdX.

Ten to fifteen years ago a lot of universities had sites imitating MIT OCW but
now very few do. The trend has been to move very good freely available notes,
etc., off of faculty webpages to behind Blackboard or similar logins; now
there is little left that is publicly available and easily accessible without
having to login to some site (or be tracked).

I spent a lot of time searching for reasons why universities went away from
OCW. Apparently, people with hearing disabilities sued universities to get
transcripts added to OCW courses that had videos on the grounds that lack of
transcripts left them at a competitive disadvantage. This didn't make sense to
me: many OCW courses had great course materials but no videos; courses with
videos could simply release one video at a time with the next video held off
until the general public / free users / people like me completed a transcript
on a wiki type site of the previous lecture. (For some of those course
materials, I would have gladly worked on transcripts on a wiki for free!)

In case there is anyone out there that isn't aware of any of these:

* [https://www.oeconsortium.org/](https://www.oeconsortium.org/)

* [https://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm](https://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm)

* [http://ocw.jhsph.edu/](http://ocw.jhsph.edu/)

* ...

~~~
18pfsmt
I had no idea they were doing this stuff to material I've benefited from
accessing. Thanks for taking the time to give us the benefit of your research.

Control freaks always want your personally identifying data, and people are
too open to giving it out. HN is one of the greats _because_ they are not such
control freaks.

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phonebucket
I have always been pleased with how willing the mathematics community is to
educate others freely.

Some other free Linear Algebra courses:

[https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06-linear-
algebra...](https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06-linear-algebra-
spring-2010/)

[https://open.math.uwaterloo.ca/](https://open.math.uwaterloo.ca/)

~~~
colmvp
Gilbert Strang's Linear Algebra course is often recommended, but I also
recommend a set of lectures on YouTube from Technion with Aviv Censor:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aefKXYYXT6I&list=PLW3u28VuDA...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aefKXYYXT6I&list=PLW3u28VuDAHJNrf3JCgT0GG_rjFVz0-j9)
since it's very beginner friendly and there's a lot of step-by-step
explanation.

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dillonmckay
I have a bit of a problem with this. I am not sure why it does not sit right
with me.

The college needs $75k of donations to be able to put the curriculum on edX?

~~~
ahmedalsudani
Watch the video. The instructors want to put it online for free—not the
university.

They have already made courses and made them available online. It was a
massive undertaking. It is not too much to ask for their effort to be funded
at the modest level they have requested.

~~~
cliffy
I think there's an argument to be made that a public university should be
putting content like this online for free anyway.

~~~
ahmedalsudani
You are free to make that argument, and you are free to change the system.

That said, it is counterproductive to make that case in the instance where
someone is trying to use public money to provide a public good. The correct
place to protest is when the university sends you your tuition bill or when
they decline you admission. The instructors have no access to or control over
the billions in their university’s endowment fund.

Right now, our options are to either fund this effort or not to fund it. I
hope that we fund it.

~~~
craftyguy
> The correct place to protest is when the university sends you your tuition
> bill or when they decline you admission.

Your "protest" over a (1) tuition bill or (2) admissions rejection is not
going to matter. You'll be sent to collections in the case of (1) or ignored
in the case of (2).

Publicly funded universities should contribute _something_ back to the public.
Generally it's fucking football or basketball (assuming you pay for the right
TV service).

You are barking up the wrong tree.

~~~
ahmedalsudani
> You are barking up the wrong tree.

:)

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holy_city
Something not touched on in the video or description but I think is
worthwhile.

The greatest failing in my math education is that it didn't give me the "keys
to the kingdom" in other words, it didn't teach me how to conceptualize
problems and really dig into literature to further my understanding on topics
as they come up.

Contrast that with my signal processing courses, which were very much focused
on concepts, conventions, notation, and best practice to provide a ground work
for future study.

And working in the signal processing field, it was easy for me to dig into
literature as I researched problems up until my math skills failed and I had
to teach myself a lot of what my grades showed I had learned in college.
Linear algebra in particular.

So when I see something like a course that will teach me about orthagonality,
linear systems, SVD and eigenvalues I want to back it. But only if it's the
kind of content that will tell me what those things _are_ and how to read
about them and understand them, not more rote memorization of how to work a
problem set.

Just my two cents.

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rficcaglia
I recall covering these topics in my undergrad linear algebra course. Textbook
was:
[https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9780387940991](https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9780387940991)

Probably not as deeply as this course proposes to be sure, but good into for
those interested.

~~~
FabHK
It's standard LA fare... Pretty much any LA textbook will cover these. For a
focus actual computation (ie numerical LA), consider Golub's (RIP) _Matrix
Computations_ (more of a reference, though, not so much for self-study),
Trefethen's _Numerical Linear Algebra_ , Demmel's _Applied Numerical Linear
Algebra_.

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jeromebaek
How is this "advanced" linear algebra? This was all covered my freshman linear
algebra course.

~~~
ivan_ah
It's the same topics as first-year linear algebra, but now done "for real"
using algorithms that scale.

Part I: SVD = bread and butter in industry with lots of applications in ML and
stats, engineering stuff too, see
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9UoFyqJca8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9UoFyqJca8)
)

Part II: Solving Linear Systems = 70% of science can be describes as A*x=b
where A is a matrix and x and b are vectors. Spoiler alert: the "find the RREF
algorithm" that we learn in first-year LA is not the most efficient (or
numerically stable) option.

Part III: Eigenvalues "for real" this time = e.g. iterative solution methods
that scale. The flagship application of this idea would be the initial
PageRank algorithm that works on the adjacecy matrix representaiton of the
graph of all webpages (millions of columns, see
[http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf](http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf)
)

So to summarize, this course covers all kinds of topics that you don't need to
know if you want to apply LA to small and medium data, but for large scale
stuff would be really good to know.

~~~
Myrmornis
I don't think that it is helpful to classify basic vs advanced linear algebra
according to whether the techniques "scale" to larger data sets. Linear
algebra isn't necessarily about data sets at all. Many of these courses (even
this "advanced" one it looks like) completely fail to convey the understanding
that vectors and linear transformations on finite-dimensional vector spaces
only acquire numerical representations as numerical vectors and matrices when
a basis is specified; but that should be part of a basic linear algebra
course.

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Myrmornis
Can anyone here say anything about the quality of this UT Austin online CS
masters program? (The online masters programs I've looked at previously I
haven't been very impressed by.)

~~~
gibba999
Based on best preliminary evidence, the Georgia Tech one is dramatically
better. A lot of shitty stuff (like this) has been coming out of UT. Georgia
Tech seems to have made a serious investment in doing online right.

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aashu_dwivedi
I like the Georgia Tech's approach to this. Most of their courses from the
online master's are also available freely as mooc on udacity.

