Werner H. Greub – författare

This textbook gives a detailed and comprehensive presentation of linear algebra based on an axiomatic treatment of linear spaces. For this fourth edition some new material has been added to the text, for instance, the intrinsic treatment of the classical adjoint of a linear transformation in Chapter IV, as well as the discussion of quaternions and the classifica­ tion of associative division algebras in Chapter VII. Chapters XII and XIII have been substantially rewritten for the sake of clarity, but the contents remain basically the same as before. Finally, a number of problems covering new topics-e.g. complex structures, Caylay numbers and symplectic spaces - have been added. I should like to thank Mr. M. L. Johnson who made many useful suggestions for the problems in the third edition. I am also grateful to my colleague S. Halperin who assisted in the revision of Chapters XII and XIII and to Mr. F. Gomez who helped to prepare the subject index. Finally, I have to express my deep gratitude to my colleague J. R. Van­ stone who worked closely with me in the preparation of all the revisions and additions and who generously helped with the proof reading.

This textbook gives a detailed and comprehensive presentation of linear algebra based on an axiomatic treatment of linear spaces. For this fourth edition some new material has been added to the text, for instance, the intrinsic treatment of the classical adjoint of a linear transformation in Chapter IV, as well as the discussion of quaternions and the classifica­ tion of associative division algebras in Chapter VII. Chapters XII and XIII have been substantially rewritten for the sake of clarity, but the contents remain basically the same as before. Finally, a number of problems covering new topics-e.g. complex structures, Caylay numbers and symplectic spaces - have been added. I should like to thank Mr. M. L. Johnson who made many useful suggestions for the problems in the third edition. I am also grateful to my colleague S. Halperin who assisted in the revision of Chapters XII and XIII and to Mr. F. Gomez who helped to prepare the subject index. Finally, I have to express my deep gratitude to my colleague J. R. Van­ stone who worked closely with me in the preparation of all the revisions and additions and who generously helped with the proof reading.

This textbook gives a detailed and comprehensive presentation of linear algebra based on an axiomatic treatment of linear spaces. For this fourth edition some new material has been added to the text, for instance, the intrinsic treatment of the classical adjoint of a linear transformation in Chapter IV, as well as the discussion of quaternions and the classifica­ tion of associative division algebras in Chapter VII. Chapters XII and XIII have been substantially rewritten for the sake of clarity, but the contents remain basically the same as before. Finally, a number of problems covering new topics-e.g. complex structures, Caylay numbers and symplectic spaces - have been added. I should like to thank Mr. M. L. Johnson who made many useful suggestions for the problems in the third edition. I am also grateful to my colleague S. Halperin who assisted in the revision of Chapters XII and XIII and to Mr. F. Gomez who helped to prepare the subject index. Finally, I have to express my deep gratitude to my colleague J. R. Van­ stone who worked closely with me in the preparation of all the revisions and additions and who generously helped with the proof reading.

The major change between the second and third edition is the separation of linear and multilinear algebra into two different volumes as well as the incorporation of a great deal of new material. However, the essential character of the book remains the same; in other words, the entire presentation continues to be based on an axiomatic treatment of vector spaces. In this first volume the restriction to finite dimensional vector spaces has been eliminated except for those results which do not hold in the infinite dimensional case. The restriction of the coefficient field to the real and complex numbers has also been removed and except for chapters VII to XI, § 5 of chapter I and § 8, chapter IV we allow any coefficient field of characteristic zero. In fact, many of the theorems are valid for modules over a commutative ring. Finally, a large number of problems of different degree of difficulty has been added. Chapter I deals with the general properties of a vector space. The topology of a real vector space of finite dimension is axiomatically characterized in an additional paragraph.

This book is built around the material on multilinear algebra which in chapters VI to IX of the second edition of Linear Algebra was included but exc1uded from the third edition. It is designed to be a sequel and companion volume to the third edition of Linear Algebra. In fact, the terminology and basic results of that book are frequently used without reference. In particular, the reader should be familiar with chapters I to V and the first part of chapter VI although other sections are occasionally used. The essential difference between the present treatment and that of the second edition lies in the full exploitation of universal properties which eliminates the restrietion to vector spaces of finite dimension. Chapter I contains standard material on multilinear mappings and the tensor product of vector spaces. These results are extended in Chapter 11 to vector spaces with additional structure, such as algebras and differ­ ential spaces. The fundamental concept of "tensor product" is used in Chapter 111 to construct the tensor algebra over a given vector space. In the next chapter the link is provided between tensor algebra on the one hand and exterior and symmetrie tensor algebra on the other. Chapter V contains material on exterior algebra which is developed in considerable depth. Exterior algebra techniques are used in the followmg chapter as a powerful tool to obtain matrix-free proofs of many classical theorems on linear transformation.