- #1
onoturtle
- 46
- 13
I'm sorry for yet another one of these threads, but I'm curious if this will lead me to a better reading for me.
I want to beef up my math background so I decided to take a look Hassani's Mathematical Physics and I planned on reading the parts on vector spaces (finite/infinite), complex analysis and group theory. Skipping the ODE/PDE stuff since I'm not that interested in it. However, working through the second chapter, I am bothered by the inconsistency of the author giving or not giving concrete examples. E.g. while the author did give examples of vector spaces, he doesn't for concepts I'm not familiar with: tensor product and complex structure. While I did look up tensor product and Dirac bra-ket notation on Wikipedia that helped clarify things (e.g. outer product as an example of tensor product), it bothers me that the author sometimes skips examples (not even in the exercises!) and I feel like this does not bode well when I reach more advanced chapters mostly filled with concepts I don't know.
I've seen Boas' book suggested numerous times in other threads and I'll probably take a look at the related chapters for complex analysis before Hassani's since that's a new subject for me. But otherwise, Boas' book doesn't seem too interesting to me and it seems like I may find a book that's between Boas' and Hassani's in level of abstractness more enjoyable to read.
To give you a better sense of what level I may be prepared for, I'm a computer scientist that took undergraduate linear and abstract algebra years ago (I don't know about group representation, which is one reason for reading Hassani's) and informally picked up some analysis from studying machine learning. Complex analysis will be a new topic for me.
I want to beef up my math background so I decided to take a look Hassani's Mathematical Physics and I planned on reading the parts on vector spaces (finite/infinite), complex analysis and group theory. Skipping the ODE/PDE stuff since I'm not that interested in it. However, working through the second chapter, I am bothered by the inconsistency of the author giving or not giving concrete examples. E.g. while the author did give examples of vector spaces, he doesn't for concepts I'm not familiar with: tensor product and complex structure. While I did look up tensor product and Dirac bra-ket notation on Wikipedia that helped clarify things (e.g. outer product as an example of tensor product), it bothers me that the author sometimes skips examples (not even in the exercises!) and I feel like this does not bode well when I reach more advanced chapters mostly filled with concepts I don't know.
I've seen Boas' book suggested numerous times in other threads and I'll probably take a look at the related chapters for complex analysis before Hassani's since that's a new subject for me. But otherwise, Boas' book doesn't seem too interesting to me and it seems like I may find a book that's between Boas' and Hassani's in level of abstractness more enjoyable to read.
To give you a better sense of what level I may be prepared for, I'm a computer scientist that took undergraduate linear and abstract algebra years ago (I don't know about group representation, which is one reason for reading Hassani's) and informally picked up some analysis from studying machine learning. Complex analysis will be a new topic for me.