Thanks for the fun story. I began appreciating mathematics and sincerely loving it due to the biographies of mathematicians like Sir Isaac Newton in Veritasium channel.
Why book though? I always thought courses are better in the sense they are hands on and easily updated. Andrew Ang’s machine learning code is gold standard
For me, most courses move too slow and it is really hard to find anything specific from watched videos.
With books & written tutorials, I can scan whole page in 1-2 seconds and skip if needed. And if need to retrieve information from previous sections, I can either use find command. In case of physical books, it is still faster then scanning through videos.
The equations you quoted result from minimizing the square of the norm of the residual of Ax-b over all inputs x, so in a sense least squares is just calculus…
Transposes correspond to integration by parts, and the question of whether A^T*A has an inverse can get involved. Also for infinite matrices the analogies hold more readily, see the observation due to Alan Edelman on page 8 of https://klein.mit.edu/~gs/papers/Paper5_ver7.pdf
Yep, I've found that if you're really good at what you do and/or have a narrow enough niche you'll have a much easier time getting people to interact with you.
If you're just alright and/or don't have a narrow niche, you need to give them more reasons to follow/interact with you. This is my case. I don't consider myself an expert in anything, and being a generalist I'm interested in a lot of stuff.
So even if people don't find my tweets or articles unique or extraordinary, many of them tend to stick around because of my personality. At least I got that!
