18.06 Linear Algebra, Spring 2010



Recent Papers on Teaching Linear Algebra

o Starting with Two Matrices (pdf)

o The Four Fundamental Subspaces: 4 Lines (pdf)

o Fourier Sine Series Examples (pdf)

o Notes on function spaces, Hermitian operators, and Fourier series (pdf)

Extras

  • A Basis for 3 by 3 Symmetric Matrices   (ps, pdf)

  • Gram-Schmidt in 9 Lines of MATLAB   (ps, pdf)

  • Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization -- a nice example (ps, pdf)

  • The SVD at work(ps, pdf): These are the pictures resulting from the best rank 1, rank 5, rank 10, rank 20 and rank 50 approximations to a 499 by 750 black-and-white intensity matrix. The approximations were obtained by keeping the k largest singular values in the SVD. The bottom right picture is the original one.

  • Question from Professor Ian Christie, West Virginia University:

    Find unit vectors h(t) and m(t) in the direction of the hour and minute hands of a clock, where t denotes the elapsed time in hours. If t = 0represents noon then m(0) = h(0) = (0,1). At what time will the hands of the clock first be perpendicular? At what time after noon will the hands first forma straight line? In the dot product m(t) * h(t),remember that sin x sin y + cos x cos y = cos(x - y).   Solution: (ps, pdf)

  • Multiplication by Columns! The multiplication Ax produces a combination
    of the columns of A. If the vectors a1, a2, ... , an are those columns, then

               Ax = x1a1 + ... + xnan = combination of columns (in the column space!)

  • A summary of how the properties of different matrices are reflected in the eigenvalues/eigenvectors: (ps, pdf).
  • Pascal Matrices (article by Alan Edelman and Gilbert Strang): (ps, pdf)

  • Too Much Calculus (an essay by Professor Strang): (ps, pdf)
  • Linear Algebra and Music   (pdf)   This fascinating article, with MATLAB codes for music and for telephone tones and for recovering answering machine information, was contributed by Derrick Smith of Laney College in Oakland. Thank you!!

  • INTERESTING DEMOS:

             Gauss-Jordan demo (9/14/98)

             LU demo(9/14/98)

             The Media Lab's Eigenfaces Demo

             Linear Algebra Records

             Projections of famous and not so famous three and four dimensional solids

             Interactive least squares fitting