Talk:06-240

I think this page needs to list the course textbook. I do not have it on me right now, however, so someone will have to add it.

Also, if anyone is interested in typesetting the lectures I think they should follow these Wikipedia guidelines: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:MSM

I attempted to typeset the Sept 12 notes, but it takes way too long to do. If we really want to have typesetted notes, it would probably be much more efficient to make a Word document and then upload it, although it's not as "official" looking.

I doubt it is eaiser to type with Word; typing is typing; you just have to get used to the different interface. And if you type in word others can view and edit it only if they have word too, and even then, fixing a typo becomes way harder. --Drorbn 03:27, 23 September 2006 (EDT)

The big differnce is formatting. In Word, it is easier to format text and MUCH easier to type equations. In Wikipedia, you have to use tags that are tedious and hard to keep track of: see the Sept 12 notes for an example. Perhpas there is an easier way of formatting text in Wikipedia that I am not aware of? (For example, maybe you can convert a Word file?)

title of the Textbook

the title of the textbook is:

LINEAR ALGEBRA by Friedberf, Insel and Spence. 4th edition. Publisher: Prentice Hall.

-nicole =)

Modular Arithmetic

This was particularly interesting after being introduced to Modular Multiplication tables and seeing some visual patterns with the numbers, such as the in the '1' column where the elements go from 1 to n-1 in Zn and backwards in the 'n-1' column.

After searching around, it seems that people had been able to discover other, more interesting patterns!

Make sure to analyze the tables since they begin from the bottom left corner instead of top left which we saw in class.

http://whistleralley.com/mod/mod25.htm

The following site allows you to see tables up to mod 30.

http://www.cut-the-knot.org/blue/Modulo.shtml

-Richard

Also, notice how in modular multiplication tables for prime numbers, in specific for modulo 5 in the columns and rows for 0 and 5 only 0s appear. The 0s create a sort of frame around a 4x4 square of elements. Specifically all elements within the frame of 0s are between 1 and n-1 and all are non-zero. In the case of the mod 4 table there was a 0 which, as proved in class causes Z4 to fail as a field. There must be something deeper about all those 0s.