Resources to understand real world usage of linear algebra

Question

I've learned linear algebra basics at university and really liked it, so I decided to learn it more deeply. Secondly, I want to work in computer science and I think linear algebra knowledge could be really helpful.

Problem is that I don't know/learned much about its real world usage. I would be very grateful for any resources/algorithms/whatever which should help me to better understand its usage in real world.

Answer 1

Much of present computer science deals with discrete structures, while you find linear algebra more often in scientific and engineering contexts. The examples that come to my mind are:

• 3D computer graphics using homogenous coordinates and matrices for scaling, rotation, translation
• image reconstruction using linear interpolation, least squares and that pseudo inverse of the normal equations

Answer 2

Dan Kalman's tutotial on SVD describes singular value decomposition from a very friendly point of view, including applications for low rank approximation and image compression. When I taught linear algebra, I used it as a basis for my presentation of SVD and it was quite successful.

Kurt Bryan's and Tanya Leise's article on the linear algebra behind Google's PageRank algorithm is also very good and presents an important application.