I was also pleased to see large deviations, although the lecture notes don’t actually define what a large deviation is.

They do give an example of a Chernoff (exponential) bound for a sum of iid random variables. The bound of course has an exponential form - they just don’t call it a large deviation. So it’s a bit of a missed opportunity, oven that the name is in the chapter title.

These bounds come up all over the place in CS, but especially lately in learning theory.

The Units seem to be independent i.e. could be followed in any order. Can someone knowledgeable confirm this? I know Set theory etc is the basis of many things usually in a formal mathematical setting, hence asking.

“A world class education available for free, to the undistractable.”

Its so hard to be self disciplined like that, I find I have to enroll to force myself to engage. I know its a weakness.

In my experience, coursera/khan academy courses have never been able to compete with a rigorous university course. They're great resources when you need alternative explanations, but never stood up on their own.

I think long lecture playlist is a feature, not a bug. It's much harder to commit to such material when you're not full timing education.

I got through a few lectures by recognizing that I didn’t have the mathematical training/practice to finish up one video in one sitting. Often times I would need to scurry on over to have some basics explained to me on another site. I did one lecture over several days (weeks if I had to). I think most of the discipline comes from expectation management. Expect to get stuck and need a few moments or days or weeks to mull something over until it becomes more intuitive. Keep a list of things you do and don’t understand (a simple text file / paper is enough) and keep doing it for a few months if you have to and you’ll get there.

I completed an earlier version of this class and found structure to be helpful. Found consistent time and place each day to spend some time learning and that helped a ton, but still had weeks of not touching it so the struggle is real :)

A bit of a side note but I find that the lectures are not the most interesting/useful part of those courses. The problem sets and the time spent trying to solve them ended up solidifying so many ideas that I had fooled myself into believing I understood. So I highly recommend heads-down solving some problems. It sinks much more time than the lectures but you come out of it better off

I love math, completed a PhD, and am very self-disciplined. But even so, I don't think I would have been able to learn much on my own with video lectures, at least not at the start. For some reason, it seems like you need to reach a "critical mass" of knowledge first before you can do that, and I've observed that a crucial component is being in a program with others, and definitely having a very experienced mentor.

Without a very experienced mentor, I think it's very difficult to get to the independent-learning stage with math. That's the key. You need someone to go through your work, correct you, and make sure you don't go off in a very wrong direction.

So my advice is find at least a graduate student in math to help you. It's like a piano teacher, if you've ever taken piano, you know it's absolutely mandatory to have a teacher. People who self-learn from the start end up being able to play but not very well.

Edit: one other crucial component is time. If you're really interested in knowing something like linear algebra, analysis, or calculus with fluency, expect to spend at least 10 hours per week on it for a year. Two hours per week will give you a cursory and very weak understanding only.

This course has been a _huge_ help to me in my current project (a G-code previewer and programmatic 3D modeling system written for (Open)PythonSCAD).

I would recommend pairing it with:

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-001-structure-and-interpretati...

and some additional online resources which I've found very helpful:

- https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.htm...

- https://www.motionmountain.net/

and of course https://librivox.org/ and https://www.gutenberg.org/ --- for a benchmark on why, well, when my father retired to a rural Virginia county, the library was a metal carrel of books in the basement of the old courthouse, and my favourite books during the summer (when I didn't have access to the school libraries) were Hal Clement's _Space Lash_ (which my father found in a tower at the prison where he worked where reading material was forbidden) and an English textbook containing a number of short stories which my mother purchased from a table of remaindered books in a department store in a town 26 miles away to which we might drive once a month or so.