Find vectors u,v that satisfy the equation Au=e_1, and Av=e_2

Guabellok4

Guabellok4

Open question

2022-08-19

Find vectors u,v that satisfy the equation A u = e 1 , and A v = e 2
I am really new to matrices and these concepts, so any help would be much appreciated.
A = [ 1 3 0 1 4 3 0 1 5 ]
We're asked to let each row = a 1 , a 2 , a 3 going down and then calculate the cross products and triple scalar products which I was able to do.
I calculated the cross products of a 1 × a 3 , and then a 2 × a 3 : which are:
a 1 × a 3 = [ 15 5 1 ]
and
a 2 × a 3 = [ 23 5 1 ]
If A u = e 1 and A v = e 2 , and I need to determine vectors u and v, could someone explain how to find u and v. I know that if I multiply A by the cross product vectors I get [38,0,0] and [0,−38,0] but this confuses me because I thought to satisfy the equation the answer should be [1,0,0] and [0,1,0]. I have also tried finding the inverse of A and multiply this by e 1 and e 2 , but the results were not even close to the result of the cross products?? I am really trying to learn, would appreciate some advice.
Is there another method to solve this?

Answer & Explanation

Trevon Hughes

Trevon Hughes

Beginner2022-08-20Added 9 answers

You are very close. Your cross product strategy gives you a vector that produces multiples of e 1 and e 2 . But remember that since A is a linear transformation, A ( λ x ) = λ ( A x ) for any scalar lambda and any vector x. So how can you choose scalars λ , μ so that A ( λ u ) = e 1 and A ( μ v ) = e 2 ? (Here u and v are the vectors you calculated).
You were also close with the strategy of finding the inverse! Note that if the inverse has columns x 1 , x 2 , and x 3 (in that order from left to right), then
A A 1 = I = [ e 1 , e 2 , e 3 ] = A [ x 1 , x 2 , x 3 ] = [ A x 1 , A x 2 , A x 3 ]
So in fact that first column of the inverse is the u you're looking for, and the second column of the inverse is the v you're looking for.
You asked a good question, namely whether the constants λ and μ can be deduced without having to calculate Au and Av and then reverse-engineering them. And the answer is yes. We'll show it for λ, but the process is identical for μ. Plugging in our expression for u, we notice that
A u = A ( a 2 × a 3 ) = [ a 1 ( a 2 × a 3 ) a 2 ( a 2 × a 3 ) a 3 ( a 2 × a 3 ) ] = [ a 1 ( a 2 × a 3 ) 0 0 ]
the last equality following from the properties of the triple product. So we can deduce that
e 1 = [ 1 0 0 ] = ( a 2 × a 3 ) a 1 ( a 2 × a 3 )
And you can further note that this expression is only ill-defined (i.e. the denominator is zero) when a 1 is a linear combination of a 2 and a 3 , which would mean that A is not invertible, in which case we would have to adopt a different method to solve this problem.
Injetaangetly2u

Injetaangetly2u

Beginner2022-08-21Added 1 answers

You have
A = ( 1 3 0 1 4 3 0 1 5 )
You seek a vector
v = ( x y z )
with the property that
A v = e 1 = ( 1 0 0 ) .
Let's write that out:
( 1 3 0 1 4 3 0 1 5 ) ( x y z ) = ( 1 0 0 ) .
Doing the matrix multiplication, we get
( 1 x 3 y + 0 z 1 x + 4 y 3 z 0 x + 1 y + 5 z ) = ( 1 0 0 ) .
Without the b rackets, that's just
1 = x 3 y 0 = x + 4 y 3 z 0 = y + 5 z
The last equation lets you replace all ys with −5z, so we get
1 = x + 15 z 0 = x + 4 ( 5 z ) 3 z = x 23 z 0 = y + 5 z
From the first two, we have
x = 1 15 z ; x = 23 z
so we conclude that
23 z = 1 15 z 38 z = 1 z = 1 38
From this, we can obtain x and y and we're done.
As you take more linear algebra, you'll learn more methodical approaches to solving problems like these, but this gets you started for now

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