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by aithrowawaycomm
482 days ago
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He is a bit older. Linear algebra is also very old, but it didn't really become the field we know today until the 1950s. I would add that in 2025 it is cheap to buy a computer that can solve large linear systems, but that certainly wasn't true in 1975, so linear algebra was less applicable in the real world. I am not too familiar with the pedagogical history of linear algebra, but I've been reading some advanced undergraduate geometry texts from the 30s-60s and linear algebra was generally not an assumed prerequisite. There was a particular separation between the studies of "two and three dimensional vector spaces over R" (largely geometric) versus "finite dimensional vector spaces over a field" (entirely algebraic), and determinants were presented directly as volume computations. These days undergraduates mostly treat R^2 and R^3 algebraically, maybe at the expense of geometric understanding. (E.g. Euler's rotation theorem is easily proved when restated as a theorem about matrices over R^3 with determinant +1, but Euler's original statement and proof using spherical trigonometry is deeper.) |
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And given that most of basic QM was formalized by 1930 and relies upon eigenvectors, hard to see any physics course taught since that time not having it.