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UCT MAM1000 lecture notes part 50 – linear algebra part iii

Courses, English, First year, Level: intermediate, MAM1000, Uncategorized, Undergraduate

UCT MAM1000 lecture notes part 50 – linear algebra part iii

Gauss reduction

So far we have seen that we have a way to translate a system of linear equations into a matrix. We can manipulate the matrix in ways which correspond to operations on the equations which keep the important information in the system of equations the same (ie. the solution of the equations before and after the operations is the same). We have seen a couple of examples of when we can read off the solution from the matrix having performed the operations. So far the order with which we perform the operations feels a bit arbitrary, although we know that we would like to get the matrix into reduced row echelon form. There is however a very systematic way of going about this, and the term for the process is called Gauss Reduction.

Here is a detailed view of what Gauss Reduction will give us:

Gauss Reduction:

To solve a system of linear equations:

1) First find the augmented coefficient matrix of the system of equations.…

By Jonathan Shock| October 4th, 2015|Courses, English, First year, Level: intermediate, MAM1000, Uncategorized, Undergraduate|1 Comment

UCT MAM1000 lecture notes part 49 – linear algebra part ii

Matrices

Solving a system of linear equations is not technically difficult: just eliminate the variables in a systematic fashion. When there are only two or three variables, this is easy to manage. But for a bigger system, things can quickly get confusing. We need to develop a systematic method.

The first thing to notice is that the names of the variables don’t matter. Consider, for example, the two systems

$\begin{array}{cc} x + y &=3\\ 2x-y &= 4 \end{array}$

and

$\begin{array}{cc} u + v &=3\\ 2u-v &= 4 \end{array}$

It’s clear that if we ignore the names of the variables — $x$ and $y$ versus $u$ and $v$ — these two systems are the same. The reason we can tell that they’re the same is because the {\em coefficients} of the variables are the same and the numbers on the right hand side are the same. These are really the only things about a system of linear equations that matter, and so what we can do is strip the system down to its bare bones and rewrite it like this:

$\left( \begin{array}{cc|c} 1&1&3\\ 2&-1&4 \end{array} \right)$

This is an augmented coefficient matrix (in general, a rectangular array of numbers, like the above, is called a matrix; a matrix with an additional vertical line, which plays the same role as the equals signs in the original equations, is augmented).…

By Jonathan Shock| October 3rd, 2015|Courses, English, First year, Level: intermediate, MAM1000, Uncategorized, Undergraduate|1 Comment

UCT MAM1000 lecture notes part 48 – linear algebra part i

These notes are taken from the resource book and were originally written by Dr Erwin. I will be editing and adding to them throughout. Most mistakes within them can thus be presumed to be mine rather than Dr Erwin’s.

In this section we are going to develop a new set of methods to solve a type of problem we are relatively familiar with. We will find a way to translate between methods we know well, but which turn out not to be very efficient, methods which are graphically very intuitive, but not very calculationally useful, and methods which are computationally extremely powerful, but appear rather abstract compared with the other two ways of looking at these problems. These three methods which we will utilise in detail in the coming sections are shown in the following diagram:

As we go through I will try and show how we can go between these apparently different formalisms.…

By Jonathan Shock| October 2nd, 2015|Courses, English, First year, Level: intermediate, MAM1000, Uncategorized, Undergraduate|1 Comment