I had a pretty disappointing week on KA. I got through the final three videos and three articles of Applications of Multivariable Derivatives but didn’t start the unit test. I got a much better idea of what constrained optimization is, how it works, and a decent grasp on why it works. A new equation/formula/concept was introduced to… Read More Week 212 – The Lagrangian: A Week of Work, but Still No Intuition
I had an interesting week working through KA. As you’ll see below, I only made it through four questions/concepts from two articles and six videos but everything I worked on was pretty hard and took a good amount of time and effort for me to understand. I started the week finishing off an article on… Read More Week 211 – Gradient Descent, Lagrange Multipliers, and Eight Pages of Notes
If I was to grade myself for my effort this week I’d give myself somewhere between a B and a B+. I made it through five videos, one exercise and 3.5 articles, and probably studied for ~7–8 hours. Part of me wishes I would have made more progress but I worked through some tricky-ish concepts (some of which… Read More Week 210 – Second Partial Derivatives: More Understanding, One Step at a Time
I’m happy to say that my fifth year working on KA got off to a pretty good start! I didn’t achieve my goal of getting all the way through the section Optimizing Multivariable Functions this week, but managed to get about halfway there. I didn’t take too many notes overall this week but did cover a lot… Read More Week 209 – Year Five Begins: A Productive Week of Multivariable Calculus
It was another disappointing week working through KA. 😒 I made it through the final article from the section Tangent Planes and Local Linearization and then made it through the first four videos in the following section, Quadratic Approximations, but that’s it. I don’t have much of a grasp on what was taught in the latter section either which makes… Read More Week 208 – A Disappointing Week, a New Challenge, and Year Five Ahead
I made some solid progress this week working through KA. I passed the unit test on Wednesday (🥳) but did have to look up two or three questions before answering them. There was only one question where I would have gotten it wrong if I hadn’t looked it up, however, and it was from a… Read More Week 207 – Unit Test Complete! A New Unit and More Calculus Progress
I’m happy with the progress I made this week but didn’t end up passing the unit test. I finished off the final section in Derivatives of Multivariable Functions which was about the Jacobian Matrix and actually managed to more-or-less understand what it’s all about, but then got smoked on the unit test. One good piece of news… Read More Week 206 – The Jacobian: A Tough Test and a Welcome Curvature Breakthrough
I wish I would have gotten more done this week but I’m still happy with the progress I made and what I was able to learn. I finished the section Laplacian and have a relatively decent understanding of what it is and how it works but still need to get a better grasp on why it works. Halfway through… Read More Week 205 – The Laplacian and Jacobian: Learning the How Before the Why
I didn’t make as much progress this week as I hoped I would but I’m still happy with the effort I put in and with what I was able to learn. I ended up watching six videos, reading two articles and finishing off two exercises. The majority of my week was spent working on understanding… Read More Week 204 – Curl, the Laplacian, and the Search for Intuition
I had another solid week this week and managed to get through 11 videos, one article and two exercises. I finished off the section Divergence, which ended up being fairly straightforward, and almost made it through the following section, Curl, but was one video and two exercises short. I likely would have made it through that section… Read More Week 203 – Divergence, Curl, and a Breakthrough with Determinants