A 91-year-old professor is why Nvidia is worth $4 trillion. His name is Gilbert Strang. He teaches linear algebra at MIT. Every AI model on Earth runs on his course. The course has been free on YouTube since 2005. The videos have earned him nothing.
MIT 18.06 opens with "The Geometry of Linear Equations." No advanced math. Strang takes a system of two equations, draws it two ways, and shows the class that a matrix is a picture, not an abstraction. The row picture is two lines that cross. The column picture is two arrows that sum to a target. Every neural network on Earth operates on the column picture.
Strang first taught linear algebra at MIT in 1962. He wrote the textbook in 1976. It is on every serious engineer's shelf. Every quant fund, every ML lab, every rendering engine at Pixar is running his math.
His central insight is that most people are taught matrices as bookkeeping. That is the first thing to unlearn. A matrix is a linear transformation. A linear transformation is a way of moving space. Once you see the space move, the math stops being algebra and becomes geometry.
The Kalman filter is a linear system. PCA is a linear system. Every gradient step in a neural net is a matrix-vector product. GPT is a stack of matrix-vector products, each one a scene from MIT 18.06 running on a Blackwell GPU.
He retired in 2023 after 61 years at MIT. The course is still up. Watched tens of millions of times.
The chip is $40,000. Strang never asked for a royalty.
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