Most of the math powering today’s large language models comes from the 17th and 18th centuries. Calculus, linear algebra, probability theory. The machines caught up to the math, not the other way around.

I picked up Why Machines Learn by Anil Ananthaswamy because I wanted to understand what actually happened, not the hype version. The book traces the mathematical lineage from early pattern recognition through deep learning with the kind of rigor and storytelling that made me rethink how I understood the whole field.