How to rape yourself 101 - Page 2

On December 09 2009 07:06 AcrossFiveJulys wrote:


I don't know anyone else who tried to juggle this many commitments their first semester either, but I bet I'm not the only one. I dunno dude, somehow everything has worked out very well minus one terrible exam. I was able to manipulate things somewhat in that I'm substituting a project in one of my courses with my research which has worked out nicely. As for significant... I wouldn't call it all that significant yet. A lot of the stuff I've been doing is empirical work testing out an algorithm that was developed in my lab. Though, I have come up with some theory on my own as well, but I don't know yet if it will wind up being useful.



I did CS as an undergrad. I did take a "linear algebra" course my first year, but I'm putting it in quotes because it was utter shit and didn't teach me anything. The only thing that made it linear algebra-ish was we memorized how to find eigen values. And by memorized I mean we did it without even being shown what they are and what they are useful for. So I might as well have had no linear algebra background. On a sidenote, I learned the subject on my own a couple months ago by watching Gilbert Strang's lectures on MIT courseware, if anyone is interested you should check it out: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Mathematics/18-06Spring-2005/VideoLectures/

On December 09 2009 08:50 m3rciless wrote:


Yeah dawg, you probably should have caught up with linear algebra at some point. I'm only a senior in high school and i'm taking Linear algebra with multivariate calculus, as i was told it's absolutely fundamental to a CS degree.

On December 09 2009 11:27 AcrossFiveJulys wrote:


Well, congrats on being such a smarty pants and taking that material only being in high school. I was able to skip the first two courses in calculus because of the AP course I took in high school, but I guess the bar is being raised nowadays for kids in math, which is a good thing.

That aside, whoever told you it's absolutely fundamental to a CS degree has no idea what they're talking about. Linear algebra is only extremely important in machine learning, my area of specialty. The only other areas of CS I know about that use Linear algebra are bioinformatics (because bioinformatics uses some machine learning algorithms) and scientific computing (part of which aims to do common scientific computations really fast, such as computing eigen values, etc). Some linear algebra might come up in graphics and/or vision but I'm not sure because I haven't taken courses in those areas. These are just a few of the many areas of CS. Saying linear algebra is fundamental to CS is like saying being able to mutalisk micro against scourge is fundamental to being a starcraft player-- you only need to know how to do it if you're a zerg player.