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How would you describe matrices to a non-

math person?
Gerard Bargalló, B.A. Mathematics, University of Barcelona (2021)
Updated Sep 1 · Upvoted by Panagiotidis Stavros, Ph.D. Mathematics & Physics,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2007) and Peter Ferguson, MSci Theoretical Physics &
Mathematics, Lancaster University (2018)

Many people, or at least some of my high school teachers, would tell me matrices were two
dimensional arrays or vectors of vectors. One teacher even told me that was a fancy way to
say chart. While it can be used in those ways, it’s something much more profound. One of
the biggest meanings a matrix can have is a transformation of vector spaces. Why would
this be important? Bear with me throughout this answer and I hope you will end up with
an idea of how important this is. I will provide a very specific (yet important) application of
matrices: the differential of a function and its geometric interpretation.

(The use of italics will usually be for clarifications to non-math people so, if you don’t
understand something, just stick with what’s in italics. Some suggestions in the comments
tell me this is too difficult for a non-math person. I added a section at the end to remedy
this, I recommend to non-math people to read that first (or last) and then come back up
and start the journey! (Btw, thank you for the suggestions) A word of caution though, if
you know nothing about maths this is a feasible but a difficult read. If you did reasonable
maths at high-school this is readable. If you study some major that involves maths that
should not be difficult. In any case I think and hope you can get value out of this answer.)

Elementary Linear Algebra studies vector spaces and the linear maps between them. For
non-math people just think about coordinate spaces like a plane and, as for the linear
maps, think about transformations that do not bend things, only transport, squize,
enlarge… All this knowledge is then used in a bunch or fields of study in mathematics. A
nice example would be the differential of a function of several variables. First,
though, some geometric preludes.

In elementary differential geometry, for example, we study surfaces. The earth is an

example (I am considering it to be a sphere for simplicity), if you look around yourself, you

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might think that the earth is flat, this is no coincidence. A surface is a set that “locally”
looks like a plane. Let’s say you are in a certain point and what you see is what we will
call the tangent plane of the sphere at the point , see picture above (from
wikipedia). In very broad non-precise terms, if, as we vary the point, the tangent plane
varies differentially (which is like saying with no breaks and without edges or only round
edges), then this surface has a differentiable structure. In our simile, you would walk and
the plane you saw would change in a very nice way, though we are too small to see it
change. You may also want to think about that as linearizations, which is locally studying
round objects with flat ones, provided that the study of flat things is much easier. In fact,
this study is carried out with linear algebra. So, to locally study the geometry of the objects
around us we need this transformations between flat things. Note that this technique is
everywhere in maths and it’s done with linear algebra and therefore needs matrices.

Back to the differential thing. In one variable, like a line, you may have studied the
derivative of a function at a point, which is a number. Usually we can find an expression of
the derivative at every point. Moreover, one of the coolest things about the derivative is
that it’s the best easy approximation of the function at a point (easy in a way we will make
precise). We will get back to this later.

Can this be done with a function that takes 2 entries and spits out 1? Yes, it can be done
using matrices (such a function would take points on a plane to numbers on a line). The
matrix is the object that represents the derivative when dealing with multivariable
calculus. We will assume that the functions we deal with are differential (when we zoom in
a lot, they are like the linear maps we talked about). What I want to explain well, is how
it’s the best approximation of the function at a point. First of all, we are thinking locally,
meaning in a very very small region around a certain point. Second of all, for non math
people, the letter of representing the function or the matrix followed by the point is the
value or the point of the corresponding transformation. If the transformation was
doubling number: , . Another example would be ,
takes every point on the plain and assings it the sum of its components,
. More generally, if we have a multivariable function , meaning
that takes a point with some coordinates and produces a new point with some other
coordinates, and the matrix representing it’s derivative at a point is , then we have
that for all the points that are very close to . Note that
this notation is meant to emphasize the transformation qualities of a matrix identifying it
with its linear map, this is okay because we have fixed a basis.

What does this mean? Well, let’s say that sends the point to 0. Then, around 0 we will
have that the function equals the matrix, . Why do we use instead of ? We
mean that , where epsilon is a little error ( in the above example
) and, more importantly, that this error is the smallest it can
be. For readers acquainted with this material, this is precisely the degree one Taylor
polynomial and . In other words, it’s the best local second order approximation

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This matrix is called the jacobian matrix of the function at the point . The linear map that
represents the derivative and that gives rise to the jacobian matrix is the differential of
at the point . Moreover, every matrix has a number associated to it, its determinant. That
also gives a lot of geometric information. The determinant of the jacobian matrix is called
the jacobian. A more precise example, from its wikipedia page:

A nonlinear map sends a small square (left, in red) to a distorted

parallelogram (right, in red). The Jacobian at a point gives the best linear approximation of
the distorted parallelogram near that point (right, in translucent white), and the Jacobian
determinant gives the ratio of the area of the approximating parallelogram to that of the
original square.

Now, let’s give some ‘other’ geometric meaning to this differential map thingy taking into
account the first part of the answer. If we consider a differentiable function ,
the set is the graph of and it’s a regular surface. This is
the set of point on our 3-dimensional space such that the last coordinate is the value of the
two first components by , it's called the graph of . Now, roughly speaking, the concept
of linearization in the previous section and the differential of the function at a point agree.
In the above picture the black plane is where and the blue
surface (a parabola) is the where . How can we compute
? Oh wonderful jacobian matrix… the Tangent plane of the surface at a
point is the image of the differential at the point (the point that gets assigned to
p, in the above example, , ),in other words (and slightly
abusing notation again) . By applying the matrix to each
point with two components that describe the graph we get the tangent plane. By the way,
picture form Wikipedia.

This would not be very nice if the value of such points by the linear map was difficult to
compute. It is not indeed. Sometimes, though, like in discrete dynamical systems we
like to apply a transformation multiple times (to see for example how certain situation may

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Diagonlization (or Jordan form, more generally) which heavily reduces the effort to
compute such a thing. Thanks to this, we can easily study or predict the behaviour of some
biological systems over the years.

Other notable uses of matrices arise in graph theory as adjacency or incidence matrices,
which are used in many applied maths. A friend of mine is now using them to study
communities of genes related to cancer stuff. They are also used to represent bilinear
forms which give rise to quadrics (like conic sections) in a projective space. And many
many more applications.

If you want to know more about this you can check any introductory book on the subject.
Here are some of my recommendations just because:

Multivariable calculus with a geometric flare: Advanced Calculus: A Geometric

View by James Callahan.

Elementary differential geometry: Elementary Differential Geometry by

Christian Bär or Differential geometry of curves and surfaces by Manfredo Do
Carmo.

Introduction to dynamical systems: An Introduction to chaotic dynamical

systems by Robert L. Devaney

Summary and dictionary for non-math people: (edit, added later)

A very non-precise definition but good enough for now: A matrix is a collection
of numbers usually put into raws and columns. They can be added, multiplied
amongst themselves and multiplied by a number.

We will describe point on a plane with two coordinates (points on spaces with
higher dimension just have more coordinates) For example, vertex of the blue
triangle is and of the red is . This will be points. Now imagine
an arrow from the point , where the two lines lines intersect, to the
point . This will be a vector and will be denoted . Wait, what? Just like
the point? Well, sort of, for our purpose here, that is enough. The only difference
you need to be aware of is that we can represent the point with vectors and that
enables us to “add points”. More specifically we can do with points what we can
do with vectors which is described in the following point. (Pic from wiki)

Vector space: a set with elements, called vectors, that can be given coordinates
(now the above definition makes more sense) and that can be added amongst
themselves and multiplied by a number in a very nice way. Linear map
between two vector spaces: A correspondence of vectors from each vector
space. It can also be seen as a transformation of one vector space into or onto the
other. This transformation, as stated, does not bend objects, only squizes , dilates

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something of the sort. Bottom line: they are the tools used to represent the basic
physical or biological phenomena. Linear maps are the simplest types of
functions.

Some of this is in the original answer. The letter of representing the function
or the matrix followed by the point is the value or the point of the
corresponding transformation. If the transformation was doubling number:
, . This is a function and a linear map. Another example
would be , takes every point on the plain and assings it the
sum of its components, . That would also a function that
is also a linear map. This is a function that is not a linear map:
. This all took point on a plane and sent them to numbers on a
line. Now we give an example that takes points from a plane to a plane:
, it flips the components. Or even,
. It looks complicated, doesn’t it? This is why
we are interested in simplifying it. More generally, if we have a multivariable
function , meaning that takes a point with some coordinates and
produces a new point with some other coordinates. Note that to do this basic
operations we are using the thing of thinking about points as vectors.

Matrices represent those linear transformation (in a sort of unique way) and
make it very easy to compute what happens to a certain vector under the
transformation. In the answer we write as the multiplication of the matrix
by the coordinate vector that represents the point . This represents the
transformation that undergoes.

The differential of a function at a point lets us replace the weird difficult

function by a linear transformation (represented by a matrix) around such point.
But not any linear transformation, the differential is the best possible one, it
minimizes the error. This is much easier for us, so it’s a good thing.

In our everyday 3-D world we encounter surfaces and things like that. When the
whole surface is a graph of a function (it is always the graph of a function locally
by the Implicit Function Theorem) then we can compute the tangent space with
the differential. This is important because the study of difficult things like
surfaces is made easy by studying these flat spaces, which can, in turn, be studied
with more linear algebra and therefore more matrices.

I hope this addendum is helpful to get a general idea for people who considere themselves
to be non-math people.

For more answers like this (about eigenvalues of matrices and linear maps) check out this
answer:

Gerard Bargalló's answer to What is an eigenvalue in layman terms?

31.1k views · View Upvoters · View Sharers

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Angela Fernando
Aug 18 · 4 upvotes
It can still be a bit complicated for non math people. But great effort and kudos!
Reply Upvote

Gerard Bargalló
Original Author · Aug 18 · 2 upvotes including Angela Fernando
Thank’s a lot for the compliment! I think only the subset of non-math people that is going to be
able to read is {person in {non-math people} : person has a lot , lot, lot of interest and curiosity
in math} haha
Reply Upvote

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About the Author

Gerard Bargalló
I love maths and have interest in several other fields.

B.A. Mathematics, University of Barcelona

Expected 2021

Lives in Barcelona, Spain

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Knows Spanish

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