Just like our noses can’t smell as much as a dog’s nose can, and our eyes can’t see parts of the light spectrum that other creatures can we can’t see space in more than three dimensions.

But the basic idea of a vector is the same whether you are talking about a line in 2 dimensions a line in three dimensions a list of values – e.g., the length, width, height, weight, color, price, manufacturer, make, model, average rating, etc. of an item in an online store

Encapsulating Complexity with Better Metaphors

I wonder if saying you need to know linear algebra to do machine learning is kind of like saying you need to know linear algebra to understand what you’re doing when you create a scene with lighting and shadows, etc. using 3D drawing software

When I used pandas and I needed to flip the data so the rows became the columns and vice versa, I didn’t need to know that I was doing a linear algebra action called a matrix transpose.

Also, a lot of the texts I read about linear algebra were hard for me to wrap my head around, because I couldn’t understand why you would want to do what they were doing. Context matters a lot.

Others

when we see a picture like this number eight. It’s actually just a bunch of numbers. For this grayscale one, it’s a matrix of numbers. If it was a color image, it would have a third dimension. So when you add an extra dimension, we call it a tensor rather than a matrix. It would be a 3D tensor of numbers ﹣ red, green, and blue Like legos? Like bathroom tiles? Like bricks on a wall? Like beads? Knitting? Like spelling out at a football game? Why? Because computers don’t have eyeballs— and they’re super good with numbers