Linear Algebra: What You Need to Know

This book is intended for a first linear algebra course. The text includes all essential topics in a concise manner and can therefore be fully covered in a one term course. After this course, the student is fully equipped to specialize further in their direction(s) of choice (advanced pure linear algebra, numerical linear algebra, optimization, multivariate statistics, or one of the many other areas of linear algebra applications).

Linear Algebra is an exciting area of mathematics that is gaining more and more importance as the world is becoming increasingly digital. It has the following very appealing features:

• It is a solid axiomatic based mathematical theory that is accessible to a large variety of students.
• It has a multitude of applications from many different fields, ranging from traditional science and engineering applications to more 'daily life' applications (internet searches, guessing consumer preferences, etc.).
• It easily allows for numerical experimentation through the use of a variety of readily available software (both commercial and open source).

This book incorporates all these aspects throughout the whole text with the intended effect that each student can find their own niche in the field.

Several suggestions of different software are made. While MATLAB is certainly still a favorite choice, open source programs such as Sage (especially among algebraists) and the Python libraries are increasingly popular. This text guides the student through different programs by providing specific commands.