"Matrix" is not just the name of a really cool action movie. In
mathematics, a matrix is just a rectangular "grid" of values. Some examples of Matrices appear below:
This is a matrix with 4 rows and 4 columns:
This is a matrix
with 3 rows and 2 columms:
13.6
17.9
22.7
0.5
-23.89
7
-1.2
63
22.9
17
15.48
6.2
122.77
-45
16
3.14
77.7
-14.3
19
66.65
22.7
61.13
Matrices can be
arbitrarily large. The smallest possible matrix would have just one row and one column -- some people call a 1
by 1 matrix a "scalar".
Vectors
A "vector" is like a one-dimensional matrix. It can be viewed as a single row or a single column. Examples
are below: