Talk:Linear map

From Citizendium
Revision as of 18:15, 9 December 2008 by imported>Barry R. Smith (Definition wrong!)
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This article is developing and not approved.
Main Article
Discussion
Related Articles  [?]
Bibliography  [?]
External Links  [?]
Citable Version  [?]
 
To learn how to update the categories for this article, see here. To update categories, edit the metadata template.
 Definition Function between two vector spaces that preserves the operations of vector addition and scalar multiplication. [d] [e]
Checklist and Archives
 Workgroup category Mathematics [Categories OK]
 Talk Archive none  English language variant American English

Major fixing needed

  1. This page is lifted from Wikipedia, but for some reason, parts of the Wikipedia page were deleted.
  2. The definition is terrible. First, every linear algebra book I have seen defines the term as "linear transformation", using map as an informal substitute afterward. But googling "linear map" and "linear transformation" shows "linear map" is much more prevalent. Perhaps because I am wrong, but more likely because people are too lazy to type "transformation"? In any case, I think the page name and main term should be "transformation", not "map", just based on my experience. Does anyone have a much different experience?
  3. Transformation does not usually refer to a map from a space to itself. Transformation is the most general term, and "operator" has a tendency to refer to a map from a set to itself. This is based on my own experience, but to back me up, here is the American Heritage Dictionary[1]
I thought I was going crazy when I looked up the definition of "operator" given on Wikipedia, saying inputs and outputs must be functions, but even there, the inputs and outputs are drawn from the same set. Can anyone back me up? Or is my experience rather unusual, and other places/cultures/books use transformation as written here and operator for more general maps?