[H-GEN] Recommendation on a Maths Textbook

[Russell Stuart]

I am hoping someone can recommend a good Maths Textbook to me.
I have recently taken an interest in Kernel Vector Machines,
and am trying to understand how they work.  I bought a book
on the subject, "An Introduction to Support Vector Machines",
which seems to cover the subject fairly well.  Unfortunately
it uses math I have not covered in any depth before: group
& field theory, hilbert spaces, gram matrices and the
like.  I am gradually picking it up from the 'net, but it is
hard going as Wikipedia and the like are reference works,
not text books.  Can someone recommend a text book that
covers the area.

Just by the by, when I did Comp Sci at UQ they did try to
give us a grounding in the Math they thought might prove
useful to someone who was going to spend their working life
in computers.  That was 20 years ago, so there was a fair bit
of guess work in what they chose to cover.  In hindsight
most of their guesses were wrong.  I have yet to find much
use for Calculus, I have never had to solve an ODE, and
trig only became useful when I started working with GPS
data.  Mind you, it was very useful then.

On the other hand, field and group theory comes up over
and over again - in crypto, coding theory, now kernel
vector machines.  We didn't cover that.

--
Russell