<p>Hey, I'm an Industrial Engineering student. All of the hardest concepts of Calc have been a cakewalk for me. I breezed through Physics. </p>
<p>I really like to visualize things and that made this stuff a breeze. Now I'm in linear algebra, and so far I just don't care for it. I must say, I like drawing graphs and diagrams and using them to solve problems. I do not like memorizing definitions and theorems and deciding that this matrix is _______ if _______ but not ______ if and only if ______. That is so exhausting to me.</p>
<p>I am doing fine in the class, and I know linear algebra has some pretty powerful applications, but I just don't like it so far. Does it get better? From what I hear, linear algebra comes up A LOT in Industrial Engineering, and I know it's sorta weird that a very visual person picked the least visual engineering major. I like the idea of industrial engineering when I think about the things I can DO with it, but I am just finding this class so annoying.</p>
<p>Linear algebra is often the most theoretical math course the average engineer takes. I don’t know if this applies to you, but many people dislike it, frankly, because it is more challenging than previous math coursework.
If you take the time to actually understand the proofs rather than simply memorizing a series of rules, you may find that you appreciate it more. </p>
<p>I’ve only taken a handful of operations research/industrial engineering courses, but from what I’ve seen, you really only need to know the basics of linear algebra.</p>
<p>You should be fairly comfortable finding putting a matrix into jordan canonical form, finding determinants, eigenvalues/eigenvectors and matrix exponentials, using matrices to solve systems of linear equations and finding the null space of a matrix. You will obviously also need to be comfortable with the basic properties of matrix multiplication and such. </p>
<p>You probably won’t ever need to truly understand linear transformations, inner product & vector spaces, tensor & wedge products, Lp spaces and all of that fun stuff.</p>
<p>Seems like your school is making engineering students take the same linear algebra course as the math majors which I don’t know if that is ideal. </p>
<p>As undergraduate math major, my linear algebra course was called “Theory of Matrices” and YES, there were a bunch of proofs.</p>
<p>For my M.S. Engineering degree, I also had a graduate linear algebra course and I don’t think I had to do one proof.</p>
<p>If you ever get to take a “Applied Linear Algebra” or “Matrix Methods” course, you will see the beauty of linear algebra. Also, you will see some elements in your operations research courses while doing linear programming.</p>
<p>Hey, thanks for the great posts.</p>