Coach UTP (Umar T. Pirzada)

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[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

An MIT professor taught the same math course for 62 years, and the day he retired, students from every country on earth showed up online to watch him give his final lecture.

I opened the playlist at 2am and ended up watching three of them back to back.

His name is Gilbert Strang. The course is MIT 18.06 Linear Algebra.

Every machine learning engineer, every data scientist, every quant, every self-taught programmer who actually understands how AI works learned the math from this one man. Most of them never set foot on MIT's campus. They just opened a free playlist on YouTube and let him teach.

Here's the story almost nobody tells you.

Strang joined the MIT math faculty in 1962. He retired in 2023. That is 61 years of standing at the same chalkboard teaching the same subject to 18-year-olds.

The interesting part is what he did when MIT launched OpenCourseWare in 2002. Most professors were skeptical. They worried that putting their lectures online would make their classrooms irrelevant. Strang did not hesitate. He said his life's mission was to open mathematics to students everywhere. He filmed every lecture and gave it away.

The decision quietly changed how the world learns math.

For decades linear algebra was taught the wrong way. Professors started with abstract vector spaces and proofs about field axioms. Students drowned in the abstraction. Most never recovered. They walked out believing they were bad at math when they had simply been taught in an order that nobody's brain is built to absorb.

Strang inverted the entire curriculum.

He started with matrix multiplication. Something you can write down on paper. Something you can compute by hand. Something you can see. Then he showed his students that everything else in linear algebra eigenvectors, singular value decomposition, orthogonality, the four fundamental subspaces was just a different lens for understanding what the matrix was actually doing under the hood.

His rule was strict. If a student could not explain a concept using a concrete 3 by 3 example, that student did not actually understand the concept yet. The abstraction was supposed to come last, not first. The intuition was the foundation. The proofs were just confirmation that the intuition was correct.

The second thing Strang changed was the classroom itself. He said please and thank you to his students. Every single lecture. He paused mid-derivation to ask "am I OK?" to check if anyone was lost. He never used the word "obviously" or "trivially" because he knew exactly what those words do to a student who is one step behind. He treated 19-year-olds learning math for the first time the way he treated his own colleagues. With patience. With respect. With the assumption that they belonged in the room.

For 62 years.

The result is something that has never happened in the history of education. A single math professor became the default teacher of his subject for the entire planet.

Universities in India, China, Brazil, Nigeria, every country with a computer science department, started telling their own students to just watch Strang's lectures. The University of Illinois revised its linear algebra course to do almost no in-person lecturing. The reason was honest. The professor said they could not compete with the videos.

His final lecture was in May 2023.

The auditorium was packed with students who had never met him before. He walked to the chalkboard, taught for an hour, and at the end the entire room stood and applauded. He looked confused for a moment, like he genuinely did not understand why they were cheering. Then he smiled and waved them off and walked out.

His written comment under the YouTube video of that final lecture was four sentences long. He said teaching had been a wonderful life. He said he was grateful to everyone who saw the importance of linear algebra. He said the movement of teaching it well would continue because it was right.

That was it. No book promotion. No farewell speech. No legacy management.

The man whose teaching is the foundation of modern AI just thanked the audience and went home.

20 million views. Zero ego. The entire engine of the AI revolution sits on top of math that millions of people learned for free from one quiet professor in Cambridge.

The course is still on MIT OpenCourseWare. Every lecture, every problem set, every exam, every solution. Free.

The most important math course of the 21st century is sitting one click away from you. Most people will never open it.

[Coach UTP (Umar T. Pirzada) @CoachUTP]

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[Coach UTP (Umar T. Pirzada) @CoachUTP]

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[Adam Grant @AdamMGrant]

"Don't bring me problems, bring me solutions" doesn't eliminate problems. It stops people from raising the hardest problems.

Leaders need to hear what's broken even if the fix is unclear.

A better option: “Bring me problems, as long as you’re willing to be part of the solution"

[Coach UTP (Umar T. Pirzada) @CoachUTP]

Very interesting development. Could this be a #GameChanger for the #Economy? What stood out for me was that only 2% of #Internet usage is on fiber & the intention is for it to reach 40-60%.

#Pakistan to Establish New Landing Stations for Submarine Cables https://t.co/k5m08iK9QC

[Coach UTP (Umar T. Pirzada) @CoachUTP]

😌 If you were able to go back in time, what #Leadership skills would you have liked to have developed a bit earlier in life❓️

💬 DM 1:1 for a personalized reflective coaching conversation.

~ Coach UTP #CoachUTP

#WeeklyCheckIn #ReflectiveQuestions #Coaching

[Coach UTP (Umar T. Pirzada) @CoachUTP]

😌 If you would have an option to choose a different career path now in 2025, what would you choose❓️

💬 DM 1:1 for a personalized reflective coaching conversation.

~ Coach UTP #CoachUTP

#WeeklyCheckIn #ReflectiveQuestions #Coaching

What are your thoughts on ##يوم_الجمعه?

[Coach UTP (Umar T. Pirzada) @CoachUTP]

@yaserawan What can be done to incentivise them to allocate a part of their excess cash to fund startups? Any thoughts?

[Coach UTP (Umar T. Pirzada) @CoachUTP]

Just heard @Arjun_Vir_Singh & Floris de Kort (@ThunesPayments) on a #Podcast about #StableCoin #Wallets #EmbeddedCrossborderPayments and found it quite insightful. 

Continuing the discussion as #UTPConversationStarter, what are your views about this?

#FinTech #KSA

[Arjun Vir Singh @Arjun_Vir_Singh]

Cards are slow. Cash is clunky.
Payments are getting faster, smarter, and more connected.
Floris de Kort, CEO, @ThunesPayments, joins me on #Couchonomics to break down how money really moves today.

🎧 Episode out now EVERYWHERE!

#Fintech #CrossBorder #DigitalWallets

[Coach UTP (Umar T. Pirzada) @CoachUTP]

😌 If there was one thing you would like to do consistently every day... what would it be❓️

💬 DM 1:1 for a personalized reflective coaching conversation.

~ Coach UTP #CoachUTP

#WeeklyCheckIn #ReflectiveQuestions #Coaching

What are your thoughts on #IndependenceDay?

[Coach UTP (Umar T. Pirzada) @CoachUTP]

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[Coach UTP (Umar T. Pirzada) @CoachUTP]

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#Finance for #Kids

[Shabnam Parveen @shabnam_774]

The 15 hilarious and Coolest maps you've probably never seen before:

1. Bosnians: I wanna swim
Croatia : No

[Coach UTP (Umar T. Pirzada) @CoachUTP]

“Again, Again... and then Again! Change hits us.“

#ChangeManagement #ChangeLeadership #Leadership #Economics #Strategy #Psychology #Volatility #Uncertainty #Complexity #Ambiguity #VUCA
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[Dr. David Burkus @davidburkus]

@AdamMGrant There’s so much power released when a leader says “I don’t know” followed by “Let’s go find out.”

[Coach UTP (Umar T. Pirzada) @CoachUTP]

#WhyDoesTheImamCry
Yesterday in Taraweeh prayers, the Imam burst into tears while reciting this and took a while to recover and finish the Rakah.

[Coach UTP (Umar T. Pirzada) @CoachUTP]

And those who, having done something to be ashamed of, or wronged their own souls, earnestly bring Allah to mind, and ask for forgiveness for their sins,- and who can forgive sins except Allah?- and are never obstinate in persisting knowingly in (the wrong) they have done.

[Mindset Machine  @mindsetmachine]

You need to see this…