Why am I passionate about this?
I've been teaching math and physics for more than 20 years as a private tutor. During this time, I experimented with different ways to explain concepts to make them easy to understand. I'm a big fan of using concept maps to show the connections between concepts and teaching topics in an integrated manner, including prerequisites and applications. While researching the material for my book, I read dozens of linear algebra textbooks and watched hundreds of videos, looking for the best ways to explain complicated concepts intuitively. I've tried to distill the essential ideas of linear algebra in my book and prepared this list to highlight the books I learned from.
Ivan's book list on textbooks for learning linear algebra
Why did Ivan love this book?
Prof. Strang has been teaching linear algebra at MIT for more than 60 years! This wealth of experience shines through in his book, which covers all the standard concepts using clear and concise explanations that have been polished through time and contain just the right amount of details.
The book is accompanied by a whole course of video lectures available through MIT OpenCourseWare or via YouTube. I learned a lot from Prof. Strang's approach to teaching; in particular, I appreciate the visualization of the fundamental theorem of linear algebra and his explanation of the matrix-vector product from the column picture and the row picture.
If you want to learn linear algebra, you can't go wrong with this classic.
1 author picked Introduction to Linear Algebra as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
Linear algebra is something all mathematics undergraduates and many other students, in subjects ranging from engineering to economics, have to learn. The fifth edition of this hugely successful textbook retains all the qualities of earlier editions, while at the same time seeing numerous minor improvements and major additions. The latter include: • A new chapter on singular values and singular vectors, including ways to analyze a matrix of data • A revised chapter on computing in linear algebra, with professional-level algorithms and code that can be downloaded for a variety of languages • A new section on linear algebra and…
- Coming soon!