This was the most productive week I’ve had on KA that I’ve literally had in months. To be fair, since I’m at the very beginning of the Linear Algebra course, all the videos and exercises I got through were incredibly straightforward, so it was very easy and I didn’t have any major insights or breakthroughs. Not to mention that it was all essentially review… BUT, nonetheless, it was a big relief for me to move quickly through the content, unlike the past few months where it’s been an absolute grind. I’m optimistic that I’ll quickly be able to get a solid grasp on what’s taught in Linear Algebra since I’ve been using it a fair amount over the past few months. Hopefully the concepts in L.A. will become clear more easily than they did for me in multivariable calculus!

(Actually, most of the concepts in MC never really became clear to me… 😕)

This week I made it through eight videos and four exercises in KA, AND also watched four videos from the Essence of Linear Algebra playlist by 3Blue1Brown. I’ve watched that playlist before but the first four videos seemed much easier to grasp this time though. I took a handful of notes from the eight videos I watched in KA which all mostly had to do with notation. I’m not going to give an explanation of my notes, but here they are:

The first exercise I worked through this week was titled Scaler Multiplication. I took screen shots from three of the questions which I’ve copied below. You’ll see that they’re embarrassingly simple questions, but I figured I’d screen-shot them for the sake of keeping track of my progress. (Also, these questions were so simple I just did them in my head, so there are no notes of my own to go with the questions.)

Question 1

Question 2

Question 3

The second exercise was titled Unit Vectors. It was pretty easy overall, although I couldn’t remember technique to solve the first question which I ended up getting wrong. Once I saw how KA solved it, I was able to solve all the remaining questions in about 30 seconds. Here are two example questions from that exercise with the first being the one that I got wrong (you’ll see that the answers I inputted are incorrect but the note I wrote out shows the correct way to solve):

Question 4

Question 5

(I did the math for this one in my head so I don’t have notes for it either.)

The third exercise was titled Add Vectors. I was annoyed because, as you’ll see in the question below, I was asked to use the “parallelogram rule” which wasn’t talked about in any of the videos leading up to this exercise. Even still, I ended up getting all four questions correct because I’m a gangster, but I was very confused on the first question. Here’s one question from that exercise:

Question 6

Finally, the fourth exercise was titled Add Vectors: Magnitude and Direction to Component. This was the only exercise that required me to do a a bit of thinking for each question. I ended up getting all four questions correct on my first try but each one took me a few minutes to get to the solution, especially on the first question where I wasn’t 100% sure if I was doing it correctly. Luckily, I’m an absolute GENIUS and I was.

Question 7

Question 8

Just to fill out this post even more, below are the four videos I watched from the Essence of Linear Algebra playlist. I took some screen shots and notes from the third video which I’ve also added below:

I mentioned this in a few of my previous posts, but oddly the Linear Algebra subject has no Mastery Points in it to achieve. The four exercises I worked through this week are the only four exercises in the entire subject and didn’t have any M.P. associated with them. The subject is composed of three units which each have a TON of videos to watch. (I’m not going to count right now, but I’m guessing there’s ~75 videos between the three units.) I find taking screen shots of videos and writing my own notes about them a lot more time consuming and more challenging than simply taking screen shots of questions in exercises and photos of my notes working through them. On one hand I could easily just watch all the videos and not write any notes about them and therefore “finish” the subject, but I want to make decent effort at actually taking notes of the videos so I feel like I’ve actually accomplished and learned something. We’ll see how it goes, but I’m hoping I can get through Linear Algebra by September. Then I’ll only have Differential Equations left to get through (which essentially is also made up entirely of videos) and then I can get back to Multivariable Calculus. It might be optimistic but I’m hoping I can have it all done by 2026. I.e. the countdown is on! ⏰ 🕰 ⏱