About these notes

These notes cover the main material we will develop in the course, and they are meant to be used parallel to the lectures. The lectures will follow roughly the content of the notes, but sometimes in a different order, or with additional material. Likewise, sometimes there will be additional material in the notes which will be referred to in lectures.

The notes contain some exercises which will be discussed in class. Sometimes the solutions to the exercises will be included as well as they may feature useful or important results. However, you are strongly encouraged to think about the exercises before reading the solution. To help with this, the gitbook version of the notes have the solutions hidden and a button to click to expand them later.

The lectures and lecture notes should be used alongside the questions on the problem sheets and in quizzes, where you will get additional practice at understanding ideas and solving problem. Mathematics is primarily learned by doing, and so you should make sure to attempt as many of these problems as you can in order to develop your mathematical skills. You will also have tutorials to help reinforce the material, and will be able to ask for help or clarification on topics both during your tutorials or at weekly drop-in sessions. Theese drop-in sessions will have space to work, so you are welcome to come along to work independently or with friends, and then ask questions as they arise.

The lectures and lecture notes for this course cover all the material you need. However, you may want to explore a textbook alongside the course material. These will usually contain much more material than notes and gives you a broader view of the subject, as well as being sources of additional problems to try. Textbooks come in different styles and use different approaches to a subject, so you should look a bit around to find one which is to your taste (so I would strongly recommend making use of the library rather than buying one, especially initially!). The following is a selection of books about Linear Algebra which are available in our Library:

  • Elementary Linear Algebra. Howard Anton

  • Linear Algebra and its Applications. Gilbert Strang

  • Linear Algebra, S. Lipschutz and M. Lipson

  • Linear Algebra. Fraleigh/Beauregard

  • Linear Algebra, an introduction. A.O. Morris

  • Guide to Linear Algebra. David Towers

  • Linear Algebra. Allenby

  • Linear Algebra and its Applications I & II. David Griffel

The books above are either introductory or have a focus on applications. A more abstract approach is followed in:

  • Abstract Linear Algebra. Curtis

  • Linear Algebra. Serge Lang

  • Finite-dimensional vector spaces. Paul Halmos