Talk:06-240/Classnotes For Thursday December 7

I wanted to ask this in class, but we ran out of time: Could you (, Professor,) give us an overview of "what we can expect" if we continue to study Algebra, or pure math in general? When I read the course descriptions, I usually only recognize a fifth of the words, so they aren't exactly enlightening: MAT 247 is "A theoretical approach to real and complex inner product spaces, isometries, orthogonal and unitary matricies and transformations. The adjoint Hermitian and symmetric transformations..." and so on.

Also at the beginning of the course, you advertised that linear algebra is the small scale basis of everything; now that we have taken the course, can you expand/defend that view? (I am not challenging it; there are many ways that are already apparently; nevertheless I think you probably have a clearer perspective).

These are obviously not time-sensitive questions, so answer (if at all) at your leisure.