Re:Ask HN: Best Mathematics book for complete noobie?
by jimbokun on Tuesday August 11, 2009 @10:14AM
(#755233)
Those Strang videos demonstrate that there are benefits to lecturing in front of an empty chalkboard (or several, in his case), chalk in hand, vs. displaying slides from a computer. Watching how he steps back and thinks out loud about what he just wrote and what to do next, double checking his work, making and correcting the occasional error, all greatly enhance the pedagogic impact.
Re:Ask HN: Best Mathematics book for complete noobie?
by bddbbdb on Tuesday August 11, 2009 @02:29PM
(#755941)
Concrete Mathematics is (as it says itself) intended for first year grad students. It is certainly good, but it is NOT for a "complete noobie". I am in a similar situation, and am finding Vellman's "How to Prove It" extremely useful. Having poked around the edges of math for about a year, I finally realized that proofs are central to mathematical maturity... No more eyes crossing when I read a new CS textbook!
Re:Ask HN: Best Mathematics book for complete noobie?
by babyboy808 on Tuesday August 11, 2009 @08:46AM
(#755080)
Basically high school stuff and up
There's a lot of great resources out there, but you need to be more specific.
For example: I really enjoyed Gilbert Strang's course on Linear Algebra, available as a series of video lectures on MIT OCW (http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Mathematics/18-06Spring-2005/Cours...).
If you are interested in Discrete mathematics, Knuth's "Concrete Mathematics" is a great book--but it might not count as "basic" enough for your purposes, depending on your background.
If by "basics" you mean "the stuff you should have learned in high school or as an undergrad", the Standard Deviants videos are fun: http://www.sdlearn.com/default.asp