Gilbert Strang: Linear Algebra, Deep Learning, Teaching, and MIT OpenCourseWare

The conversation begins with a personal account of Gilbert Strang's influence: his MIT OpenCourseWare lectures reached millions, including the interviewer, and presented matrices, vector spaces, eigenvalues, transformations, and decompositions as tools that extend from artificial intelligence to physics. Strang attributes part of the reach to the importance of linear algebra, but also to repeated classroom experience that helped him organize the material and explain it simply at a blackboard.

Strang describes MIT OpenCourseWare as a deliberate choice to give educational knowledge away rather than treat it only as a product to be marketed. His own 18.06 videos were recordings of an ordinary class, taught in a real classroom, yet their informal and friendly quality helped show what MIT teaching could be like. In this account, the value of open education is not separated from the act of teaching: making the class public is also a way to make the institution's technical culture visible.