Practitioners Study Too Much Linear Algebra When practitioners do circle back to study linear algebra, they learn far more of the field than is required for or relevant to machine learning. Linear algebra is a large field of study that has tendrils into engineering, physics and quantum physics. There are also theorems and derivations for nearly everything, most of which will not help you get better skill from or a deeper understanding of your machine learning model. Only a specific subset of linear algebra is required, though you can always go deeper once you have the basics.