The most incredible educational experience of my life was this course I did at Columbia University while in High School on game programming. At the end of the course we made our own game with OpenGL, but for the first week or so we'd have basically math classes in the morning on he physics of lighting, and then in the afternoon we'd implement the things we did in C. It was where I was introduced to lots of math concepts, including vector math that I would not see in school for another year or so.
At any rate, at the end we built our own raytracer, and say a text file with vertices that was given to us produce an image on the screen from 100% code that we'd written ourselves. It was one of the most empowering, deep intellectual experiences I've ever had.
To echo this sort of experience, I recently bought the pragprog book The Raytracer Challenge, and it was similarly satisfying. I wasn’t really out to follow OP’s advice to “get into” graphics, but I saw the book release and wanted to give it a shot. To be able to see a 3D-rendered sphere appear on screen using code that I wrote from the very bottom up is deeply, deeply satisfying (and a great way to level up with the programming language of your choice).
Out of interest, does learning linear algebra in this way give you a deeper sense of linear algebra? Do you think you think you are able to formulate other problems more effectively in terms of LA as a result?
Absolutely. Like, for the average school kid learning about vector multiplication or dot products of things of this kind are so abstract and seem kinda pointless. But the way he taught it, we had a problem in terms of making things look real. And the math was motivated as a strategy to solving those issues. Based on the real world problem, it was great to develop intuition for the results.
At any rate, at the end we built our own raytracer, and say a text file with vertices that was given to us produce an image on the screen from 100% code that we'd written ourselves. It was one of the most empowering, deep intellectual experiences I've ever had.