Last week I wrote about me being finished reading chapter 2 of Mathematics for Machine Learning, how I was starting to do the end of chapter exercises, and how I was gonna move on to the next chapter of the book once I was done with the exercises. Turns out, there were some problems in that exercise set that bamboozled me so hard that I feel like I gotta spend more time getting better at linear algebra before reading the next chapters.

There was one problem in particular (problem 2.12) about the basis of the intersection of 2 subspaces that I spent almost 2 days trying to understand to no avail. Here is the problem:

To the 4 people that I know who currently read my weekly updates: please refrain from sending "this question is easy" messages in my DMs. I don't want to hear it.

I spent those 2 days trying to reread the textbook, watching youtube videos on similar problems, reading Stack Exchange forums, and prompting AI models to explain it to me. After 2 days of doing that though I still couldn't understand shit and also felt like I forgot everything I read and learnt about linear algebra in the week prior to doing the exercises, so I decided to reread about all the linear algebra topics again.

I decided to continue learning off Paul's math notes entirely now, as it covers mostly the same material in the MML book but it's easier to read. I feel like the MML textbook was too verbose for my liking and contained too many weird math symbols that I had to constantly google the meanings for. Paul's math notes also contains chapters about determinants and Euclidean n-space in between learning about matrix calculations, linear transformations, and vector spaces. I think the MML book also covers this information in chapters 3 and 4 too. It's separated from the chapter about linear algebra though. I have no idea why.

Yeah so I guess this week I made negative progress. I thought I was gonna go read the next chapter of the MML book but just ended up having to understand linear algebra basics more deeply than from reading the MML book's chapter 2 once. I guess I shouldn't have expected to have learnt that much linear algebra and to have understood it all in the span of a week. This stuff is kinda hard :/

Maybe by next week I'll be done with learning about linear algebra and move on to other math topics? Nevermind I'm not claiming anything about my progress next week. See you next week. Hopefully I don't end up making negative progress again...