MA 123

This course provides an introduction to the basic ideas, computational techniques, and applications of linear algebra: systems of linear equations and Gaussian elimination; matrices and matrix operations, matrix inverse, orthogonal matrices; matrix rank; introduction to determinants, Cramer's rule; vector geometry in R2 and R3; linear combinations, linear span, linear independence; linear transformations in R2 and R3; introduction to eigenvalues, eigenvectors and diagonalization of real matrices; quadratic forms in R2 and R3. Various applications of linear algebra in science and finance are presented and discussed. This course will make extensive use of mathematical software to solve computation problems. <br>