I am struggling to understand what is going on here.
1. What does the T exponent stand for?
2. "In part(a), it is easily seen that (a, b, c)T can be written as" Why is that? I don't easily see it.
3. Where did the zero come from? 0(1, 2, 3)T
I would guess that (1,2,3)
T means
transpose -- the column vector containing 1, 2, 3. This is mostly a way to save space on the page, especially in problem statements. You can see that in the explanation of part (b), they rewrite the transposes as column vectors.
Once you give us a readable image, or you type out what it says, we can be more sure, but I think (a) is something like this:
r1, r2, r3, (1,2,3)T
where I am guessing that r
1, r
2, r
3 are probably the standard basis vectors (1,0,0)
T, (0,1,0)
T, (0,0,1)
T. Can you see that a(1,0,0)
T + b(0,1,0)
T + c(0,0,1)
T = (a,0,0)
T + (0,b,0)
T + (0,0,c)
T =(a,b,c)
T? Then adding the 0 vector doesn't change it; so you can add 0(1, 2, 3)
T. The idea here is that you can add any additional vector to a spanning set, and the resulting larger set still spans.
A good technique in reading a textbook is to read backward, i.e. use the explanation to see what they meant, by matching up the notation used there (column vectors) with the notation used earlier (transposes). Also, there may be an index of notations in your textbook, which would be a place to look up what T means; otherwise, scan through the definitions in the chapter until you find it. But now, you can just look up the word "transpose".