HW February 26

More room to discuss HW

For homework due on the 26th, I'm running into problems determining why sets of vectors might be independent or not. I don't understand the correlation. The book is somewhat vague. Anyone got any ideas in layman's terms? (3.2) Jefferst

Yeah I start the homework and was running into the same problem anyone got ideas?Jskelto

Two vectors are independent if they aren't dependent. And they are dependent if you can multiply them by scalar constants and then add them up to zero. I'm not sure why they're called "independent" other than it might be because none of the vectors can be written as linear sums of the other vectors, and therefore do not "depend" on the other vectors. An easy way of testing whether vectors are independent is to simply arrange them in a matrix and take the determinant. Non-zero means independent. Josh Hunsberger

Hey thanks for the tips Josh. The plain English version helps sometimes. Jefferst


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