Definition
A matrix is a rectangular array of numbers or other mathematical objects, for which operations such as addition and multiplication are defined. Most commonly, a matrix over a field F is a rectangular array of scalars from F. Most of this article focuses on real and complex matrices, i.e., matrices whose elements are real numbers or complex numbers, respectively. More general types of entries are discussed below. For instance, this is a real matrix:
The numbers, symbols or expressions in the matrix are called its entries or its elements. The horizontal and vertical lines in a matrix are called rows and columns, respectively.
Read more about this topic: Matrix (mathematics)
Famous quotes containing the word definition:
“Mothers often are too easily intimidated by their children’s negative reactions...When the child cries or is unhappy, the mother reads this as meaning that she is a failure. This is why it is so important for a mother to know...that the process of growing up involves by definition things that her child is not going to like. Her job is not to create a bed of roses, but to help him learn how to pick his way through the thorns.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)
“One definition of man is “an intelligence served by organs.””
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, not to find a universal formula for it, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)