No label defined (Q4792007)

This delightful, short (ca. 210 p.), and elementary textbook for first or second year students covers a large portion of the standard material of a first Linear Algebra course in four chapters on linear equations, matrices, their diagonalization under basis change, and determinants. Its presentation is driven by many detailed and often non-standard applications examples that are mainly solved algorithmically. The book is further divided into 77 short sections. The declared aim of the author is to rouse the students' interest through applied examples and not to present Linear Algebra from or through its concepts. The book is very modern in its approach to finding eigenvalues of matrices via vector iteration and the vanishing polynomial. It does, however, not treat orthogonality, orthonormal bases, Gram-Schmidt, singular values, normal matrices, or the Schur triangularization. Symmetric matrices are treated on only 2 pages in the book. The book's strength lies in its many applied examples; its weakness -- other than the omission of some essential first course topics -- lies in the author's decision not to build a conceptual fundament of the subject in the reader's mind. On the other hand, this may make following the book rather popular.