Learn some linear algebra. Literally every how'd-they-do-that-technique from OCR to PageRank is based on putting data in to a matrix and extracting some eigenve

Learn some linear algebra. Literally every how'd-they-do-that-technique from OCR to PageRank is based on putting data in to a matrix and extracting some eigenvectors. I took LA in college, but my professor was no where near as good and on topic in relation to computer algorithms as this guy: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Mathematics/18-06Spring-2005/CourseHome/index.htm http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Mathematics/18-06Spring-2005/Cours... Oh, check out R. There are a lot of free papers and example code showing say, how principal component analysis on a dataset of migratory geese can be used to explain so and so, along with generating some pretty pictures. It's a really nice bit of OSS!