Essential Math for AI

Preface

Why I Wrote This Book

AI is built on mathematical models. We need to know how.

I wrote this book in purely colloquial language, leaving most of the technical details out. It is a math book about AI with very few mathematical formulas and equations, no theorems, no proofs, and no coding. My goal is to not keep this important knowledge in the hands of the very few elite, and to attract more people to technical fields. I believe that many people get turned off by math before they ever get a chance to know that they might love it and be naturally good at it. This also happens in college or in graduate school, where many students switch their majors from math, or start a Ph.D. and never finish it. The reason is not that they do not have the ability, but that they saw no motivation or an end goal for learning torturous methods and techniques that did not seem to transfer to anything useful in their lives. It is like going to a strenuous mental gym every day only for the sake of going there. No one even wants to go to a real gym every day (this is a biased statement, but you get the point). In math, formalizing objects into functions, spaces, measure spaces, and entire mathematical fields comes after motivation, not before. Unfortunately, it gets taught in reverse, with formality first and then, if we are lucky, some motivation.

The most beautiful thing about math is that it has the expressive ability to connect seemingly disparate things together. A field as big and as consequential ...