MAT 217 Notes: Honors Linear Algebra

Fall 2021
By Aathreya Kadambi
Expanding on Lectures by Professors Ruobing Zhang and Yunqing Tang

Below are my notes from MAT 217 (Honors Linear Algebra) at Princeton. My professors were Prof. Ruobing Zhang and Prof. Yunqing Tang, and my precept instructor (precepts are essentially smaller lectures where background material and examples are covered more intensively to support classes) was Dr. Takumi Murayama. I loved all of their teaching styles and might try to emulate them in the future. Professor Ruobing had this very unique and amazing way of teaching where he referred to large ideas and concepts as “stories” and taught the class as if we were listening to a huge epic with a plotline. Professor Yunqing used blackboard space very efficiently and had a style that I can only describe as elegant; the way she ended each class gave me the same feeling I get when I close the back cover of a book and it felt like she was taking a bow (in my memory I can’t even remember if she actually took a bow or if I’m just remembering it like that). She was also super responsive outside of class. Professor Takumi was very interactive and easy to talk to and did what I loved about Professor Gilbert Strang: listing the (three) topics for class before class began providing almost a backbone for the class and making formatting my notes easier. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the class; (obviously, I’m biased since Linear Algebra is one of my favorite fields but) it was fun to be in and I learned a TON that I’ll most definitely use in the future.

My class notes are below. Right now they’re in a Draft 1, but in accordance with this “mental gym program” thing for math that I made for myself, (hopefully) they will be onto higher drafts soon.

MAT 217 Notes Draft 1

As a side update, in the following years I’ll be moving these course notes pages onto a new blog (a project I’m calling GoldenFlames). But for now, most of this inthesolved.wordpress.com is being moved onto my new blog: redflame.ml. I’ll make a larger post about it after I populate RedFlame with more posts.

(2024 Update): It’s been a while