The best mathematics (well, statistics) text book I have used. Both the subject and this book (and some R knowledge) helped me understand statistics like my statistical theory course was never able to do. I suppose that is to be expected once you apply mathematics to real examples (for example, I really didn’t truly understand what an “estimator” even was until I had to find the MLE’s for the standard error and the least squares estimators from this text and APPLY THEM, all I knew was how to prove it existed prior). It’s a shame that this will be the last math book I ever read, as I have truly and finally found my interest in mathematics (shame that grad school stats requires so much analysis that I would fail out, in addition to whatever Bayesian statistics is (and the always mentioned but never explained Monte Carlo Simulation)).
Unlike in most other text books I have used, this one actually had questions that you could solve solely by reading the text. I don’t understand why this is so difficult for most mathematics authors to do (particularly for questions requiring proofs), but in almost every textbook I have used, many questions cannot be answered through I reading of the chapters. However, here it is the opposite. This subject has some of the most interesting and widely applicable usage in math (at least in my experience). I genuinely had fun applying this knowledge to the data sets provided in this book. Never expected predicting things to be so easy, even given relatively small samples. I even used the knowledge I got from this text book for my final project in my Data Science with R class (actually got to use the Mallows Cp value (and adjusted R-squared!!) to find the best subset for a linear regression model given a diamond’s nine characteristics to predict price (just an FYI, only depth percentage was taken out of the best subset model due to multicollinearity)).
If you are even remotely interested in why math matters in EVERY subject, get your hands on this book or take a Udemy class on linear modeling. And stop complaining about how it’s been “another year without having to find the value of x.” Because I can, using linear modeling, predict how small your IQ is based on whether you complain about math being taught in school or not, thanks to this book.