MAT 1302 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Ofu-Olosega, European Credit Transfer And Accumulation System, Gaussian Elimination

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Mathematics
• Course: MAT 1302
• Professor: Aaron Tucker

Document Summary

Last class we completed the rst stage of the course, which concerned using some linear algebraic tools to solve systems of linear equations. The main result was that it is always possible to determine when a system has solutions and what those solutions are when they exist using row reduction of matrices. That process is going to be fundamental throughout the course; we"ll call on it a lot, so be sure to make sure you"re comfortable with it and practiced enough that it comes easily to you. But now we"re going to move on and study linear algebra as a more gen- eral theory. That theory concerns algebraic structures called vector spaces. Matrices will come back into play as the means by which we describe trans- formations of these spaces, and we will de ne more operations on them for this purpose.