Elementary Linear Algebra

by Arthur Wayne Roberts

Book Overview

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0805383026
• ISBN13: 9780805383027
• Release Date: January 1982
• Publisher: Benjamin-Cummings Publishing Company
• Length: 390 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Excellent Classic work in a semester course of undergraduate Linear Algebra

This text was completed just in time for Wayne Roberts to teach me and about eighteen other Macalester College Math majors about Linear Algebra; we were the guinea pigs for the course material. Some errata were discovered in the summer of 1982, for which I immodestly claim credit -- the 8th chapter, about Markov Chain processing with matrices, has some very large numbers in its denominators which were discovered by a BASIC program written to process Markov chains. The course was a lot of fun, both because of the skills of the instructor and because the book constantly connected what we were doing with real-world applications. The book's only real weakness was inevitable: it was written in 1981-1982, in a world before the MATHEMATICA software existed and therefore is limited in its treatment of computer application programming with matrices. I recommend it to you if you are a serious student of matrix mathematics applications; it doesn't dumb down _anything_ and still manages to remain accessible with a modicum of work. I wish it were still in print. No, you can't have my copy. It's autographed.

You pays your dues

In linear algebra - as in all things - you've got to begin at the beginning.This book gives the newcomer to linear algebra a great fundamental feel and intuition for span, linear dependence, etc.If you put the necessary effort in, that is.Some aspects are a not so clearly presented - I found change of basis better explained in the text that was set for my unit in linear algebra - but then, determinants are explained better to the novice than in many textbooks.And the best time to use this book is in the long vacation period before the semester in which you will undertake linear algebra. That is the time, and this is the book, for starting out along the road.