Basis

Given a vector space

V

the set

ℬ \subseteq V

is said to be a basis if

B

is linearly independent and

B

spans

V

The plural of basis is bases.

The Size of a Basis is Unique

Suppose that

ℬ, 𝒞

are bases for

V

then

| ℬ | = | 𝒞 |

TODO: Add the proof here.

Every Vector Space has a Basis

For any vector space

V

there is a basis for it

TODO

Dimension of a Vector Space

Suppose that

V

is a vector space then since it has a basis

ℬ

then we define:

\dim (V) = | ℬ |

Note that the above defintion makes sense as the size of all bases are the same

Finite Dimensional Vector Space

A vector space

V

is said to be finite dimensional if

\dim (V)

is finite

representation in a basis

Let $ℬ = {b_{1}, \dots, b_{n}}$ be a basis for a subspace $V$ and let $v \in V$ . The representation of $v$ in the basis notated by $wam (v, ℬ)$ is the matrix:

wam (v, ℬ) = [\begin{matrix} a_{1} \\ ⋮ \\ a_{k} \end{matrix}]

where $v = \sum_{i = 1}^{k} a_{i} b_{i}$ , note that $wam (\cdot, ℬ) : V \to M_{k \times 1} (ℝ)$ and wam is an acronym for "written as matrix". We can also define the inverse function $wav (\cdot, ℬ) : M_{k \times 1} (ℝ) \to V$ . Which stands for "written as vector"

If a basis is clear by context, then we may omit it and write $wam (v)$ or $wav (v)$ .

generating a unit column matrix

Given a vector space

V

with basis

𝒱 = {v 1, \dots, v_{k}}

, then for each element

i \in [k]

wam (v_{i}, 𝒱) = e_{i}

v_{i} = 0 v_{1} + \dots + 1 v_{i} + \dots + 0 v_{k}

therefore by the definition of

w a m

we have

w a m (v_{i}, 𝒱) = e_{i}

uniquely determined

Given a vector space

V

of dimension

k

we say that a vector

x

is uniquely determined, when there exists only one collection of constants

c_{1}, \dots, c_{k}

such that

x = \sum_{i = 1}^{k} c_{i} \cdot v_{i}

where each

v_{i}

is a basis element for the basis of

V

basis implies unique representation

suppose that

V

is a vector space and let

S

be a non-empty subset of

V

. Then

S

is a basis of

V

if and only if every vector

x \in V

can be represented uniquely as a linear combination of the vectors in

S

TODO

something

Let

T : V \to W

be a linear transformation between two vector spaces with

\dim (V) = k

\dim (W) = l

with

k, l \in ℤ^{+}

. Supposing that

{v_{1}, \dots, v_{k}}

and

{w_{1}, \dots, w_{l}}

are the respective bases, then

T : V \to W

is uniquely determined by the

l \cdot k

scalars used to express

T (v_{j})

for each

j \in [k]

in terms of

{w_{1}, \dots, w_{l}}

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 $T (v_{j}) \in W$ since it's a vector in $W$ it can be written as a linear combination of the basis vectors in $W$ , so that $T (v_{j}) = \sum_{i = 1}^{l} a_{i} w_{i}$ .

Now given a generic $x \in V$ which is not necessarily a basis vector, we can represent it as follows $T (x) = T (\sum_{j = 1}^{k} c_{j} v_{j}) = \sum_{j = 1}^{k} c_{j} T (v_{j})$ recalling from our previosu paragraph, we can see that $\sum_{j = 1}^{k} (c_{j} \sum_{i = 1}^{l} a_{i} w_{i}) = \sum_{j = 1}^{k} \sum_{i = 1}^{l} c_{j} a_{i} w_{i}$ .

The lets us conclude that $T (x) = \sum_{j = 1}^{k} \sum_{i = 1}^{l} c_{j} a_{i} w_{i}$ and that $T$ is uniquely determined by these $l \cdot k$ constants

matrix representation of a transformation

Let

T : V \to W

be a linear transformation, then there exists a matrix

M_{T}

such that

wav (M_{T} wam (v)) = T v

for any

v \in V

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 $v_{k} \in 𝒱$ into the above equation which yields: $T v_{k} = wav (M_{T} wam (v_{k}, 𝒱)) = wav (M_{T} e_{k}) = wav ({(M_{T})}_{|}, k})$

Thus $wam (T v_{k}) = {(M_{T})}_{|}, k}$ , so the columns of $M_{T}$ are $T v_{k}$ written as a column matrices. Graphically we have

M_{T} = [\begin{matrix} ↑ & ↑ & ↑ & ↑ \\ wam (T v_{1}) & wam (T v_{2}) & \dots & wam (T v_{k}) \\ ↓ & ↓ & ↓ & ↓ \end{matrix}]

change of basis matrix

let

𝒱 = {v_{1}, \dots, v_{k}}

and

𝒲 = {w_{1}, \dots, w_{1}}

be bases for a vector space

V

and

v

be an arbitrary element of

V

. Then the matrix

M_{𝒱 \to 𝒲}

such that :

M_{𝒱 \to 𝒲} wam (v, 𝒱) = wam (v, 𝒲)

is called the change of basis matrix from

𝒱

𝒲

Suppose that we have an ordered, linearly independent set

S : (s_{1}, \dots s_{k})

for some

k \leq n

of vectors in a finite dimensional vector space

V

, then it can be extended to a basis of

V

By fixing any new basis of

V

(TODO: prove that for any vector space there is always a basis that spans it)

b_{1}, \dots b_{n}

, then by concatenating it with

S

we obtain

(s_{1}, . . ., s_{k}, b_{1}, . . ., b_{n})

. Then for each

i \in [n]

(in order) (TODO: this is an algorithm), remove

v_{i}

from the ordered set iff

v_{i}

is in the span of all the earlier elements in the set. In particular, once we have checked and kept

n - k

of the

v - i

(TODO: say why that's guarenteed), we can discard the remaining

v_{i}

, leaving a basis:

(s_{1}, . . ., s_{k}, v_{i_{1}},, \dots v_{i_{n - k}})

Extending a Basis

Extend the ordered set

([\begin{matrix} - 2 \\ - 2 \\ 3 \\ 0 \end{matrix}], [\begin{matrix} - 4 \\ - 3 \\ 6 \\ 0 \end{matrix}])

to a basis of

ℝ^{4}

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 $ℝ^{4}$ clearly spans it (by it's very definition), then we would also know that $([\begin{matrix} - 2 \\ - 2 \\ 3 \\ 0 \end{matrix}], [\begin{matrix} - 4 \\ - 3 \\ 6 \\ 0 \end{matrix}], [\begin{matrix} 1 \\ 0 \\ 0 \\ 0 \end{matrix}], [\begin{matrix} 0 \\ 1 \\ 0 \\ 0 \end{matrix}], [\begin{matrix} 0 \\ 0 \\ 1 \\ 0 \end{matrix}], [\begin{matrix} 0 \\ 0 \\ 0 \\ 1 \end{matrix}],)$ spans all of $ℝ^{4}$ , but cannot be a linearly indpenedent set because it would be impossible to have five linearly independent vectors in $ℝ^{4}$ (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{matrix} 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{matrix}],

By the casting out method, we know that since the fourth and fifth columns are non-pivot columns and therefore the vectors $[\begin{matrix} 0 \\ 1 \\ 0 \\ 0 \end{matrix}], [\begin{matrix} 0 \\ 0 \\ 1 \\ 0 \end{matrix}]$ can be cast out, leaving us with the basis:

([\begin{matrix} - 2 \\ - 2 \\ 3 \\ 0 \end{matrix}], [\begin{matrix} - 4 \\ - 3 \\ 6 \\ 0 \end{matrix}], [\begin{matrix} 1 \\ 0 \\ 0 \\ 0 \end{matrix}], [\begin{matrix} 0 \\ 0 \\ 0 \\ 1 \end{matrix}],)