Matrix Algebra for Engineers

Well, when the sun goes down and the moon comes up
I turn into a teenage Goo Goo Muck
Yeah, I cruise through the city and I roam the streets
Looking for something that is nice to eat, mmm
You better duck
When I show up
The Goo Goo Muck
I'm the night headhunter looking for some head
With a way-out body underneath that head
Yeah, I'll get you, baby, with a little luck
'Cause I'm a teenage tiger and a Goo Goo Muck
You better duck
When I show up
The Goo Goo Muck
Yeah, the city is a jungle and I'm a beast
I'm a teenage tiger looking for a feast
Yeah, I want the most but I'll take the least
'Cause I'm a Goo Goo Muck tiger and a teenage beast
You better duck
When I show up
The Goo Goo Muck
The Goo Goo Muck

This course was great in terms of learning the mechanics for solving linear algebra problems. After completing the course, I feel like I have a better understanding of linear algebra but also that much more self-motivated learning will be required to gain even better understanding.

There are several areas for improvement in the course content and also some additional things I would love to see as far as building upon this foundational course from Professor Chasnov:

1) Professors Chasnov's teaching style is excellent and the use of the lightboard is impactful. Future courses taught in this way and style would be beneficial for students.

2) Although the lecture content is great, the solutions to many of the follow-on exercises that required proofs were too condensed and didn't seem adequate with regards the rigorous steps required to prove things.

3) The flow of video content going from vectors spaces to solving the least squares problem took a big conceptual leap that wasn't easily apparent to newcomers to linear algebra. I think there needs to be one more video prior to the discussion of the least squares problem designed to fill this gap.

4) It would be great to have a follow-up course dedicated to four or five engineering and business problems and using the linear algebra tools from this course to solve those problems. This would solidify not only the concepts learned in this course but also why these concepts are critical and impactful to solving real world problems.

5) It would be great to have another follow-up course dedicated to computer coding of the content from item 4 using a language like Python.

6) Specifically, it would be great to have a course on machine learning and the critical role of linear algebra in the context of developing machine learning solution. This course would take smaller tasks within the broader machine learning solutions and demonstrate how to use linear algebra to tackle those tasks (for example PCA to perform dimensionality reduction).

Thank you for an insightful class.

Nick Jathar

I am a seasoned software engineer going back to school next year for studying physics. I attended this course to improve my skills in matrix algebra and spent a really good time. Many thanks to Pr. Chasnov for making this course available.

Here’s what I liked
Having videos + a PDF is really useful. Each one left alone would be hard to work with.
Having exercises for each chapter really helps memorizing.
The video on transparent board with multiple colors is really readable. Seeing you speaking makes the experience nice and much better than most math courses on internet.
Each video ending with a recap really helps understanding.
You take time to answer questions, thank you a lot. This makes your course better than lot training I could find before. Some of your answers were a bit concise to me however (mainly in the Differential equation courses).
Letting us demonstrate facts about matrices rather than just memorizing them is great. On the other hand, I sometime felt like we are given recipes to apply that appeared to me like black magic. But I understand that proving everything would make the course much longer so I finally think you chose the best tradeoff.

My wife and I both got the music intro and outro sentence of each video saved in our mind now :D

Thank you very much and congratulation for this work Pr. Chasnov!