Hard to remember what life as a student was when I did my Bachelors (although I do remember missing the first week’s lectures and being in the pub a lot – a misunderstanding two of us had when one lecturer told us lectures started in a weeks time – he meant his, we heard all…).
To learn from you had only the lecturers, fellow students, and literature. The books were good at half explaining things and then setting problems to get you to explain the rest. That doesn’t work for me; especially if the answer isn’t there to check against.
Some lecturers were the same or worse. I remember a maths professor who just used to write on 3 sequential chalk boards all lecture. If anyone had the nerve to raise a question on what he was writing, he would stop, delete at least half to one chalkboard, and then just repeat his writing.
Now we have the internet, and many people willing to share. I’m rather happy to have stumbled across a video series that actually focuses on the intuition behind quantum mechanics and why linear algebra is the right tool. Things are beginning to make a little more sense.
I begin to see why, and how, linear algebra is used.
We need a mathematical object that can hold all possible values of a measurement (since the outcome is random) and that can represent each outcome has a probability. Then we also need a way to operate on those – for example to extract those discrete values.,
Vectors are the natural representation of all the values, and of the operators
Let’s get entangled…