But it would be much easier just to have Mathematica convert row and column vectors to lists when they're passed to ParametricPlot, etc.Īlso, couldn't matrices be threaded over lists of vectors, instead of requiring the clutter of mapping the dot-product?Īnd why doesn't MatrixForm applied to the result give me the expected list of matrices, in standard layout. I've figured out that I can just add in a substitution rule to do that, so I guess that's not too much to ask. One main wish: Anywhere we have what is a vector argument to a function, we should be able to type it as a row or column vector. One is not necessarily better than the other. There are different traditions of teaching this stuff. So it's not quite accurate to say that this is 'not kosher'. When I studied linear algebra, we started with vectors, not 'row vectors' and 'column vectors', and I didn't find it confusing. I believe most of these people come from MATLAB or MATLAB-inspired software which typically doesn't support vectors at all, only row and column matrices. This is all unnecessary complication in Mathematica, which does support proper 1D vectors, as well as N-D tensors. On Mathematica.SE I regularly see people trying to use 'row vectors' and 'column vectors' and a lot of transposision and complex indexing to try to do simple tasks. I find this implementation much more logical and consistent than what I see in rigidly matrix based systems like MATLAB, which don't even support vectors. Correspondingly, Dot does tensor contraction, not just matrix multiplication.

Mathematica was designed to work with tensors of arbitrary dimensions, not just 2-dimensional matrices.

Matlab multiply matrix by vector