Nostr

OK sometimes I get really confused about the current state of education, whether I am too old already, or if I went to an extraordinary school when I was a kid and never knew, or what the fuck.

I am watching a 7 hour YT video about Linear Algebra just because that's how bored I am, and the presenter is going through the outline of the contents and how this is the fundamentals of data science, machine learning, AI and I guess the prevention of balding too.

So an intro about vectors, vector operations, Pythagoras, trig, angles, etc., then dot product, then on to matrices, Gaussian reduction, transposition and inversion of matrices... and she says how this is stuff that people encounter in 2nd or 3rd year... of university? What?

I am pretty sure I did this in middle school, or maybe it was high school already ("high school" started after 8th grade back then) but I know I did it.

Especially Gaussian reduction and matrix transposition and inversion, because yes, that shit is traumatizing when they make you solve it on the blackboard with the other 40 kids watching, so how could I forget.

The point is, I studied languages in uni, nothing even remotely mathematical in nature, so whenever all that was, it happened when I was a kid.

Are you seriously telling me *kids these days* do not learn any of that in middle school, or at least high school?

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Discussion

( -_-) 1y ago

I didn't see a matrix until 1st year of university.

hh 1y ago

WTF. I'm 44. You?

( -_-) 1y ago

Early 30s

bitFerret 1y ago

Encountered matrices in year 11, higher maths class

hh 1y ago

So basically just one year before you went to uni (if you did), and in a special class? That's another difference besides the age -- for us it was just the normal math class. All kids did it.

bitFerret 1y ago

Yeah pretty much, the only thing different may potentially be the focus on a wider breadth of subjects than a deep depth on a few?

The Beave 1y ago

If you go back even farther, before electronic calculators, children were learning to use logarithms to do more complex math in grade school.

It hasn't been education, at least in the US, since the early 1910s, at least in the big cities, and it spread over the next few decades and has lead to much of the stupidity we see today.

BottleTeams 1y ago

I would say it's touched on in HS math, its really nothing too complex. It's never really applied until you get to physics and math courses at uni.

Once you start using PCA and SVD for matrix math those concepts can start to get complicated and they are the basis for a lot of the AI and Data analysis.