Let \( \mathcal{B} = \left \lbrace b_{1} , \ldots , b_{n} \right \rbrace \) be a basis for a subspace \( V \) and let \( v \in V \). The representation of \( v \) in the basis notated by \( \text{wam} \left ( v , \mathcal{B} \right ) \) is the matrix:
where \( v = \sum_{i = 1}^{k} a_{i} b_{i} \), note that \( \text{wam} \left ( \cdot , \mathcal{B} \right ) : V \to M_{k \times 1} \left ( \mathbb{R} \right ) \) and wam is an acronym for "written as matrix". We can also define the inverse function \( \text{wav} \left ( \cdot , \mathcal{B} \right ) : M_{k \times 1} \left ( \mathbb{R} \right ) \to V \). Which stands for "written as vector"
If a basis is clear by context, then we may omit it and write \( \text{wam} \left ( v \right ) \) or \( \text{wav} \left ( v \right ) \).
To show that the linear transformation is uniquely determined by these scalars, we will try to use the fact that elements in each vector space are already uniquely determined by their own constants and go from there.
Let \( v_{j} \) be one of the basis vectors for \( V \), then consider \( T \left ( v_{j} \right ) \in W \) since it's a vector in \( W \) it can be written as a linear combination of the basis vectors in \( W \), so that \( T \left ( v_{j} \right ) = \sum_{i = 1}^{l} a_{i} w_{i} \).
Now given a generic \( x \in V \) which is not necessarily a basis vector, we can represent it as follows \( T \left ( x \right ) = T \left ( \sum_{j = 1}^{k} c_{j} v_{j} \right ) = \sum_{j = 1}^{k} c_{j} T \left ( v_{j} \right ) \) recalling from our previosu paragraph, we can see that \( \sum_{j = 1}^{k} \left ( c_{j} \sum_{i = 1}^{l} a_{i} w_{i} \right ) = \sum_{j = 1}^{k} \sum_{i = 1}^{l} c_{j} a_{i} w_{i} \).
The lets us conclude that \( T \left ( x \right ) = \sum_{j = 1}^{k} \sum_{i = 1}^{l} c_{j} a_{i} w_{i} \) and that \( T \) is uniquely determined by these \( l \cdot k \) constants
To see what the matrix is, we can try to figure out what it's columns are.
Recall that we can extract the column of a matrix using the column extraction method discussed earlier
To be successful at that we need to generate a unit column matrix. We can do so by plugging in \( v_{k} \in \mathcal{V} \) into the above equation which yields: \( T v_{k} = \text{wav} \left ( M_{T} \text{wam} \left ( v_{k} , \mathcal{V} \right ) \right ) = \text{wav} \left ( M_{T} e_{k} \right ) = \text{wav} \left ( \left ( M_{T} \right )_{\left . \right |} , k \right \rbrace ) \)
Thus \( \text{wam} \left ( T v_{k} \right ) = \left ( M_{T} \right )_{\left . \right |} , k \rbrace \), so the columns of \( M_{T} \) are \( T v_{k} \) written as a column matrices. Graphically we have
First of all note that these two vectors must be linearly independent, if they were dependent, then the by comparing the first component of these two vectors we would see that the second is twice the first, whereas comparing the second component would tell us that the second vector is \( \frac{3}{2} \) times the first vector, which is a contradiction, so they must be linearly dependent.
Since the standard basis for \( \mathbb{R}^4 \) clearly spans it (by it's very definition), then we would also know that \[ \left( \begin{bmatrix} -2 \\ -2 \\ 3 \\ 0 \end{bmatrix}, \begin{bmatrix} -4 \\ -3 \\ 6 \\ 0 \end{bmatrix}, \begin{bmatrix} 1 \\ 0 \\ 0 \\ 0 \end{bmatrix}, \begin{bmatrix} 0 \\ 1 \\ 0 \\ 0 \end{bmatrix}, \begin{bmatrix} 0 \\ 0 \\ 1 \\ 0 \end{bmatrix}, \begin{bmatrix} 0 \\ 0 \\ 0 \\ 1 \end{bmatrix}, \right) \] spans all of \( \mathbb{R}^4 \), but cannot be a linearly indpenedent set because it would be impossible to have five linearly independent vectors in \( \mathbb{R}^4 \) (TODO: prove why),
Now we can use the casting out method to determine which of the column vectors are linearly dependent on the other vectors, we start by putting all the column vectors as the columns of a matrix and then row reduce, which yields
\[ \begin{bmatrix} 1 & 0 & 0 & -\frac{1}{2} & 10 & 0 \\ 0 & 1 & 0 & \frac{1}{4} & -\frac{29}{6} & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 1 & 0 & \frac{2}{3} & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 1 \end{bmatrix}, \]By the casting out method, we know that since the fourth and fifth columns are non-pivot columns and therefore the vectors \( \begin{bmatrix} 0 \\ 1 \\ 0 \\ 0 \end{bmatrix}, \begin{bmatrix} 0 \\ 0 \\ 1 \\ 0 \end{bmatrix} \) can be cast out, leaving us with the basis:
\[ \left( \begin{bmatrix} -2 \\ -2 \\ 3 \\ 0 \end{bmatrix}, \begin{bmatrix} -4 \\ -3 \\ 6 \\ 0 \end{bmatrix}, \begin{bmatrix} 1 \\ 0 \\ 0 \\ 0 \end{bmatrix}, \begin{bmatrix} 0 \\ 0 \\ 0 \\ 1 \end{bmatrix}, \right) \]