Math 2406: Abstract Vector Spaces

Lecture 13 Plan  (Thursday, October 4, 2007).

Guest lecturer: Professor Guillermo Goldsztein

Apostol 4.7-4.9.

We have seen that one-to-one maps have nice properties: they are invertible and have a trivial null space. We'll use these two properties to show they are uniquely characterized by how they transform bases. What's more, we can use this property to understand a matrix more fundamentally: it transforms coefficients of elements in a basis  of the domain into coefficients of elements in a basis of the range.

Review questions:

1. How does the fact that a one-one map has a trivial null space enter into the proofs of Theorems 4.11 to 4.13?
2. We can specify a linear transformation uniquely based on how it transforms a basis into another set (not necessarily a basis).  When we introduce matrices in Theorem 4.13, we only talk about transformations from one basis to another basis. What if {w} is not a basis--does the Theorem still hold? Think of an example in R^2.
3. How do we know c implies b in Theorem 4.12?

No homework is due October 11.