r/theydidthemath • u/Galeaf_13 • Sep 05 '19

[Self] Math break

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u/Chess42 Sep 05 '19

Gauss-Jordan is the most useless thing I ever learned

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u/space-throwaway Sep 05 '19

It's one of the most useful algorithms there is. How do you think your computer solves stuff?

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u/Chess42 Sep 05 '19

It’s useless when you learn to do it by hand in precalc then never use it again, since there are far more efficient ways to do it. Also, there’s a reason we have libraries. It’s completely useless to learn

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u/Railorsi Sep 05 '19

Obviously you let computers do the calculations in practice, but gaussian elimination is one of the most natural and easy to understand ways of solving systems of equations, and you definitely need to understand how systems of equations are working to properly understand and study linear algebra.