Linear Algebra in Action

This book is based largely on courses that the author taught at the Feinberg Graduate School of the Weizmann Institute. It conveys in a user-friendly way the basic and advanced techniques of linear algebra from the point of view of a working analyst. The techniques are illustrated by a wide sample of applications and examples that are chosen to highlight the tools of the trade. In short, this is material that the author has found to be useful in his own research and wishes that he had been exposed to as a graduate student. Roughly the first quarter of the book reviews the contents of a basic course in linear algebra, plus a little. The remaining chapters treat singular value decompositions, convexity, special classes of matrices, projections, assorted algorithms, and a number of applications. The applications are drawn from vector calculus, numerical analysis, control theory, complex analysis, convex optimization, and functional analysis. In particular, fixed point theorems, extremal problems, best approximations, matrix equations, zero location and eigenvalue location problems, matrices with nonnegative entries, and reproducing kernels are discussed. This new edition differs significantly from the second edition in both content and style. It includes a number of topics that did not appear in the earlier edition and excludes some that did. Moreover, most of the material that has been adapted from the earlier edition has been extensively rewritten and reorganized.

Harry Dym, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel