But that course is the very basics that you need before you can start doing applications. Just like you have to learn a bit of vocab and grammar before you can

But that course is the very basics that you need before you can start doing applications. Just like you have to learn a bit of vocab and grammar before you can start conversing in a foreign language. Once you’ve done that course you could start to actually learn some AI or optimisation or whatever. If you want, there is a course called 18.065 that he is written that is about AI and is far more application-based. He reviews the 30 hours or so (by lecture time) of his famous LA course in the first 5 or so lectures before springing off into everything you need to end up with AI. But the contents of his classic course (having an intuition for the 4 subspaces, describing and decomposing matrices in terms of the eigenvalues and vectors, analogies for non-square matrices) are in no way maths for the sake of maths, they are fundamental to understanding any onward applications of LA. They are the very basic words and grammar that let you start using LA in real combat situations. So that you could pick any random paper on ai or stats or control theory and actually be able to follow it rather than just be staring at hieroglyphics. It’s really worth the 30 or so hours of your life.