<story><title>Linear algebra for game developers </title><url>http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/07/linear-algebra-for-game-developers-part-1/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ColinWright</author><text>I&apos;ve just re-read what I&apos;ve said, and while I&apos;m going to leave it as written, I&apos;d ask please not to take it the wrong way.  My background is in pure math, so my understanding and expectation is different from most people here.&lt;p&gt;So ...&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m surprised to see this sort of thing described as &quot;Linear Algebra&quot; because to me it&apos;s just utterly basic vectors, pretty much the first 20 minutes of the Linear Algebra course I did.  I&apos;ve always been confused in the past when people have said that learning linear algebra is critical to games and similar, but if this is what they meant, the confusion is largely cleared.&lt;p&gt;So I&apos;d ask the HN community:&lt;p&gt;* Is this what you all mean by Linear Algebra?&lt;p&gt;* What other topics do you want to know about?&lt;p&gt;Many thanks in advance, I always welcome the opportunity to learn, even when painful at the time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Ogre</author><text>I&apos;m a game developer.  My specialty is network programming, so I don&apos;t deal with this stuff a lot, but it&apos;s impossible to completely avoid it.&lt;p&gt;I also majored in CS at a college where the CS department was part of the Mathematics department (though it moved to Engineering in my last year.)&lt;p&gt;What I mainly remember of Linear Algebra was that it and I didn&apos;t get along.  I struggled a lot with all the heavy math classes. When I started picking up matrix operations much later, from looking at other programmers&apos; code, it didn&apos;t really occur to me to call it &quot;Linear Algebra&quot;.  When I saw the title of this article, I still didn&apos;t think that&apos;s what it was going to be about.&lt;p&gt;So, I&apos;m a game developer and I&apos;m with you, it&apos;s not what I&apos;d think when I hear Linear Algebra either, though if I thought really hard and fought off the flashbacks, I could probably find matrix operations mixed in somewhere with my scant memories of Linear Algebra in college.&lt;p&gt;That said, this is a great series of articles for aspiring game developers.  Everyone needs to know these basics these days (Ok, maybe not if you&apos;re making match 3 games or word puzzles or the like).  I wish someone had just shown me this 15 years ago.</text></comment>
<story><title>Linear algebra for game developers </title><url>http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/07/linear-algebra-for-game-developers-part-1/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ColinWright</author><text>I&apos;ve just re-read what I&apos;ve said, and while I&apos;m going to leave it as written, I&apos;d ask please not to take it the wrong way.  My background is in pure math, so my understanding and expectation is different from most people here.&lt;p&gt;So ...&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m surprised to see this sort of thing described as &quot;Linear Algebra&quot; because to me it&apos;s just utterly basic vectors, pretty much the first 20 minutes of the Linear Algebra course I did.  I&apos;ve always been confused in the past when people have said that learning linear algebra is critical to games and similar, but if this is what they meant, the confusion is largely cleared.&lt;p&gt;So I&apos;d ask the HN community:&lt;p&gt;* Is this what you all mean by Linear Algebra?&lt;p&gt;* What other topics do you want to know about?&lt;p&gt;Many thanks in advance, I always welcome the opportunity to learn, even when painful at the time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tptacek</author><text>This is an awesome thread.&lt;p&gt;Since you asked:&lt;p&gt;Give me the shortest path in Khan videos, reading assignments, and exercises to LLL lattice reduction starting at &quot;the first 20 minutes of a linear algebra class&quot;.&lt;p&gt;(You asked! Lattice basis reduction is used in several practical RSA attacks).</text></comment>