Learning Math for Machine Learning
This is excellent.  Thank you for taking the time to write it.<p>I don't know what is it about math -- especially when it involves manipulation of symbols as opposed to pictures or lay language -- that turns off so many people.<p>The fact that so many software developers "don't like math" is ironic, because they're perfectly happy to manipulate symbols such as "x", "file", or "user_id" that stand in for other things every day.  The entirety of mathematical knowledge is very much like a gigantic computer language (a formal system) in which every object is and must be precisely defined in terms of other objects, using and reusing symbols like "x", "y", "+", etc. that stand in for other things.<p>Perhaps the issue is <i>motivation</i>?  Many wonder, "why do I need to learn this hard stuff?"  If so, the approach taken by Rachel Thomas and Jeremy Howard at fast.ai seems to be a good one: build things, and then fill the theoretical holes as needed, motivated by a genuine desire to understand.