On and off, I've tended to read quite a bit. So, I thought I'd put up some reviews of books as I read them. In time, I may go back and add reviews of some of the books I read in the past. Not massively exciting, but I suppose it may be of interest to someone, somewhere (perhaps).
Linear Algebra - Serge Lang
In the late '90s I did first year undergraduate maths. As part of that, I did a pull-forward module from the second year on linear algebra. Or rather, I started it. Half-way through the course I discovered that I'd been failing to correctly distinguish the lecturer's us, vs and nus (this took a rather long time as he mumbled, so you had to reverse as much as you could from what he wrote on the blackboard). So, I gave up the course and never came back to it as I'd switched to computer science the next year.
Skip forward a decade and I'm catching up on lost maths. I have finally finished reading a Springer yellow book! On the downside, it's from their undergrad series. On the upside, it's written by Serge Lang, a famous Bourbakiste. On the downside, it is linear algebra, probably the simplest 'proper' maths. On the upside, at least it's not Lang's 'Introduction to Linear Algebra', a simpler text.
Moreover, I think I understood it pretty well. Conveniently I knew much of the material already, but I learnt plenty new and I now have a much stronger grasp of much of the material. I found the presentation very good. Strangely, the effective culmination of the book, a theorem about Jordan Normal Form, was by far the most terse and difficult to follow proof, for apparently no good reason! (I skipped the appendix on Iwasawa decomposition, which I may come back to after warming up my group theory.)
Would I recommend it? If you're somehow in the state of being reasonably mathematically literate but don't know linear algebra (a strange state!), yes.
Permalink. Posted 22:30, Thu, 06 Jan 2011.
There is also a complete index of the books.
Mail me at random.user@arbitrary.name.