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In mathematics, a matrix (pl.: matrices) is a rectangular array or table of numbers, symbols, or expressions, with elements or entries arranged in rows and columns, which is used to represent a mathematical object or property of such an object.
In computer science, an array is a data structure consisting of a collection of elements (values or variables), of same memory size, each identified by at least one array index or key. An array is stored such that the position of each element can be computed from its index tuple by a mathematical formula.
Other languages provide only one-based array types, where each index starts at 1; this is the traditional convention in mathematics for matrices and mathematical sequences. A few languages, such as Pascal and Lua, support n-based array types, whose minimum legal indices are chosen by the programmer.
It is frequently helpful in mathematics to refer to the elements of an array using subscripts. The subscripts can be integers or variables. The array takes the form of tensors in general, since these can be treated as multi-dimensional arrays. Special (and more familiar) cases are vectors (1d arrays) and matrices (2d arrays).
This article lists some important classes of matrices used in mathematics, science and engineering. A matrix (plural matrices, or less commonly matrixes) is a rectangular array of numbers called entries. Matrices have a long history of both study and application, leading to diverse ways of classifying matrices.
In mathematical terms, an associative array is a function with finite domain. [1] It supports 'lookup', 'remove', and 'insert' operations. The dictionary problem is the classic problem of designing efficient data structures that implement associative arrays. [2] The two major solutions to the dictionary problem are hash tables and search trees.
Function rank is an important concept to array programming languages in general, by analogy to tensor rank in mathematics: functions that operate on data may be classified by the number of dimensions they act on. Ordinary multiplication, for example, is a scalar ranked function because it operates on zero-dimensional data (individual numbers).
As exchanging the indices of an array is the essence of array transposition, an array stored as row-major but read as column-major (or vice versa) will appear transposed. As actually performing this rearrangement in memory is typically an expensive operation, some systems provide options to specify individual matrices as being stored transposed.