How to learn mathematical notation?

Question

Do you have any recommendations of books or websites that would teach me mathematical notation. As a developer I work on a wide range of projects from .NET/SQL Server stuff through to Flash games and I often find myself referring to articles on the internet for guidance. Many of the articles contain mathematical formula, and unless they are accompanied by "plain English" explanations I usually struggle to convert the formula into code.

I have a degree in Interactive Multimedia, and so I have had no formal higher math education, however, I don't find math to be too taxing to figure out.

Hopefully by learning this notation I will be able to further my knowledge by actually being able to get stuck into more of it.

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Note: please, don't suggest I go back to school, and do a higher math course as, while I know this would be the best bet, it simply isn't an option. Other than that, any and all suggestions are welcome.

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Update

Here are a few types of thing that I program most often. I'm not sure what areas of math these cover.

• 2d and 3d collision detection
• Reporting utilities for data collection applications (registration forms, surveys, etc.)
• 2d and 3d vector math, mainly based around games
• Colour manipulation (programmatically fading from one colour to the next, adding and subtracting colours, making colours lighter / darker on the fly)

Hope this helps add a bit of context.

Answer 1

You can find a boat load of free math books here: http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/mathematics.php

If you're looking for just a table of symbols and what they mean, Wikipedia has a nice list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_mathematical_symbols

Answer 2

It sounds like a lot of your applications are in computer graphics.

One of the classic textbooks is Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice by Foley and Van Dam. You might consider getting a copy. It may not slow down to explain matrices (see the link I gave for a page on coordinate transforms), but there's enough context there that you can probably do just fine if you either do some basic searches on some of the linear algebra concepts, or check out a linear algebra book from the library.

It doesn't sound like you'd benefit a lot from a full "digestion" of a linear algebra course (which goes into eigenvalues, matrix factoring, & other stuff). I'd just take one concept at a time as it comes up. You can learn quite a bit from slow osmosis.