Sorry if I sound exclusively negative about someone else's hard work – that is not the intention.
I find people's obsession over memorizing mathematical symbols (part 2) really strange. If you understand what the concepts involved in a symbol mean, you won't have a problem recognizing the commonly used symbols. And if you don't understand what the concepts involved mean, then having memorized the symbol does you no good.
Am I missing something?
Edit, since I'm apparently in a very critical mood today: It seems very strange for a document to barely scratch the absolute essentials for something as important and broadly applicable as linear algebra, yet go on and on and on with quite esoteric lists of special primes that surely concern at most researchers in specialized parts of number theory? Of all the lists of primes that the author chooses to focus on, I must say I had only heard of three (Fibonacci, Mersenne and Gaussian). Granted, my PhD is in a very different part of math, but this seems a bit… crazy… in such a document. (Also, are the lists "even primes: 2", and "odd primes [insert list of all other primes here]" meant as jokes?)
Edit 2: Same goes with the obsession with pi. The amount of effort and space spent on features of primes and pi that are incredibly unimportant except to very specialized researchers is… a bit insane in a document like this.
>If you understand what the concepts involved in a symbol mean, you won't have a problem recognizing the commonly used symbols.
>And if you don't understand what the concepts involved mean, then having memorized the symbol does you no good.
this would imply in learning a new language if you know what the concepts a word refers to means that you won't have any difficulty recognizing the word - no matter how many words there are, how long the statement you are reading is, and how similar various words are to each other?
When learning something it is nice to have a reference.
Indeed - formal symbols have no intrinsic meaning, and one must learn their meaning as a separate step from learning their form and how to recognize them.
One's chances of finding out what an unfamiliar symbol means in context (or a familiar symbol in unfamiliar usage) is greatly helped (though not completed) if you can get a name or one or more précis of its uses.
If it is about memorizing then yeah, I don't get it. If it is a handy reference for I found a weird symbol what does it mean, then I do. When I was 14, I found a 1960s era electrical engineering text book. Being rather nerdy I bought it and read most of it. The only problem was I didn't understand the math because it had this weird S symbol in it. I didn't know what it was called or what it was about so I couldn't even formulate the question to find out more.
I don't think this is supposed to be a serious attempt to write a math reference book, this looks much more like the result of personal interests. That would very well explain why a lot of room is allocated to niche topics while on the other hand entire areas areas of mathematics are missing.
I find people's obsession over memorizing mathematical symbols (part 2) really strange. If you understand what the concepts involved in a symbol mean, you won't have a problem recognizing the commonly used symbols. And if you don't understand what the concepts involved mean, then having memorized the symbol does you no good.
Am I missing something?
Edit, since I'm apparently in a very critical mood today: It seems very strange for a document to barely scratch the absolute essentials for something as important and broadly applicable as linear algebra, yet go on and on and on with quite esoteric lists of special primes that surely concern at most researchers in specialized parts of number theory? Of all the lists of primes that the author chooses to focus on, I must say I had only heard of three (Fibonacci, Mersenne and Gaussian). Granted, my PhD is in a very different part of math, but this seems a bit… crazy… in such a document. (Also, are the lists "even primes: 2", and "odd primes [insert list of all other primes here]" meant as jokes?)
Edit 2: Same goes with the obsession with pi. The amount of effort and space spent on features of primes and pi that are incredibly unimportant except to very specialized researchers is… a bit insane in a document like this.