18.06SC

Linear Algebra

About This Course

This course covers matrix theory and linear algebra, emphasizing topics useful in other disciplines. Linear algebra is a branch of mathematics that studies systems of linear equations and the properties of matrices. The concepts of linear algebra are extremely useful in physics, economics and social sciences, natural sciences, and engineering. Due to its broad range of applications, linear algebra is one of the most widely taught subjects in college-level mathematics (and increasingly in high school).

This course is brought to you by MIT OpenCourseWare, and provided under our Creative Commons License. It is also available for study on the OCW website.

Recommended Prerequisites

18.02 Multiple Variable Calculus is a formal prerequisite for MIT students wishing to enroll in 18.06 Linear Algebra, but knowledge of calculus is not required to learn the subject. To succeed in this course you will need to be comfortable with vectors, matrices, and three-dimensional coordinate systems. This material is presented in the first few lectures of 18.02 Multivariable Calculus, and again here. The basic operations of linear algebra are those you learned in grade school – addition and multiplication to produce "linear combinations." But with vectors, we move into four-dimensional space and n-dimensional space!

Instructor

Gilbert Strang

Professor of Mathematics, MIT
Gilbert Strang was an undergraduate at MIT and a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford. His Ph.D. was from UCLA and since then he has taught at MIT. He has been a Sloan Fellow and a Fairchild Scholar and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a Professor of Mathematics at MIT, an Honorary Fellow of Balliol College, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Professor Strang has published eleven books, including most recently Linear Algebra and Learning from Data (2019).

License and Terms of Use

This course is licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA), which permits you to freely download, share, and adapt the material so long as you give appropriate credit, use it only for non-commercial purposes, and any remix and redistribution of derivative works uses this same CC BY-NC-SA license.

Frequently Asked Questions

Find answers to the most common questions and find information on further assistance here.

Course Number:
18.06SC
Classes Start:
Classes End:
Estimated Effort:
12 hours per week
Length:
13 weeks
Year Created:
2019