Affine transformationIn Euclidean geometry, an affine transformation or affinity (from the Latin, affinis, "connected with") is a geometric transformation that preserves lines and parallelism, but not necessarily Euclidean distances and angles. More generally, an affine transformation is an automorphism of an affine space (Euclidean spaces are specific affine spaces), that is, a function which maps an affine space onto itself while preserving both the dimension of any affine subspaces (meaning that it sends points to points, lines to lines, planes to planes, and so on) and the ratios of the lengths of parallel line segments.
Row echelon formIn linear algebra, a matrix is in echelon form if it has the shape resulting from a Gaussian elimination. A matrix being in row echelon form means that Gaussian elimination has operated on the rows, and column echelon form means that Gaussian elimination has operated on the columns. In other words, a matrix is in column echelon form if its transpose is in row echelon form. Therefore, only row echelon forms are considered in the remainder of this article. The similar properties of column echelon form are easily deduced by transposing all the matrices.
Pivot elementThe pivot or pivot element is the element of a matrix, or an array, which is selected first by an algorithm (e.g. Gaussian elimination, simplex algorithm, etc.), to do certain calculations. In the case of matrix algorithms, a pivot entry is usually required to be at least distinct from zero, and often distant from it; in this case finding this element is called pivoting. Pivoting may be followed by an interchange of rows or columns to bring the pivot to a fixed position and allow the algorithm to proceed successfully, and possibly to reduce round-off error.
Row and column spacesIn linear algebra, the column space (also called the range or ) of a matrix A is the span (set of all possible linear combinations) of its column vectors. The column space of a matrix is the or range of the corresponding matrix transformation. Let be a field. The column space of an m × n matrix with components from is a linear subspace of the m-space . The dimension of the column space is called the rank of the matrix and is at most min(m, n). A definition for matrices over a ring is also possible.
Conjugate transposeIn mathematics, the conjugate transpose, also known as the Hermitian transpose, of an complex matrix is an matrix obtained by transposing and applying complex conjugate on each entry (the complex conjugate of being , for real numbers and ). It is often denoted as or or and very commonly in physics as . For real matrices, the conjugate transpose is just the transpose, . The conjugate transpose of an matrix is formally defined by where the subscript denotes the -th entry, for and , and the overbar denotes a scalar complex conjugate.
