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Ask HN: Rusty at math, best applied books and materials to relearn?

8 pointsby pbowyeralmost 3 years ago
I&#x27;ve spent the past 2 days writing code to work with OCR results and use the position of words and sentences to link them together and classify them.<p>In the process my math knowledge has had a real workout, even though it&#x27;s 2D geometry.<p>I did undergrad physics at university 20 years ago. Since then I&#x27;ve done web programming that hasn&#x27;t needed maths and I&#x27;ve forgotten so much. Though I don&#x27;t feel I ever understood the maths properly, just enough to pass my courses.<p>Can you recommend any books or learning materials to help me get back in practice? I&#x27;m a visual learner and learn best with applied examples, which is where many of my textbooks fell down as they were too abstract. Anything that&#x27;s based on doing maths on images or something I can see and draw results on is even better.<p>I&#x27;m also looking for material that covers how you apply maths on computers. E.g. I was extrapolating a line through two points and got caught out when the gradient went to infinity (in x-y coords, a line parallel to the y-axis). I fudged it by adding a tiny amount to the denominator so it&#x27;ll never by zero, but I&#x27;d like to learn the proper way to handle these cases. Translating problems into vector representations would be good too, as I tried and got lost in the different meaning of Vector between physics and math.

2 comments

floxyalmost 3 years ago
Maybe check out the book:<p>Coding the Matrix: Linear Algebra through Applications to Computer Science<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codingthematrix.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codingthematrix.com&#x2F;</a>
chazeonalmost 3 years ago
Look like reviewing a bit of linear algebra would be helpful to you. The extrapolation problem is one of that. Assuming (x1,y1) and (x2,y2), the line you are looking for is (x,y) = a * (x1,y1) + (1-a) * (x2,y2) is a LA problem. There are many books on LA out there, i learned from Gilbert Strang, but not sure how deep you’d have to go.