Background Plus a Bit
For this class, I assume you know the fundamentals of linear algebra, multivariable calculus, and probability. You should also know how to write and debug simple programs in Julia1, or know enough programming to pick it up. But there are some things you may never have forgotten that you will need for this class, and there are other things that you might not have learned. This section will describe some of these things.
The examples in this book will be in Julia. If you are unfamiliar with Julia but familiar with MATLAB or Octave, you should be able to read most of the code. The syntax may be slightly more mysterious if you primarily program in some other language, but I will generally assume that you have the computational maturity to figure things out.
(People often refer to “mathematical maturity” and mean enough facility with mathematical thinking that a student can follow somewhat advanced material and learn any missing background with minimal assistance. I am using “computational maturity” here to mean the analogous ability to fill in missing background when it comes to coding.)↩︎