Appendix A Sage Reference
We have introduced a number of Sage commands throughout the text, and the most important ones are summarized here in a single place.
- Accessing Sage
- In addition to the Sage cellls included throughout the book, there are a number of ways to access Sage.
-
There is a freely available Sage cell at
sagecell.sagemath.org
. -
You can save your Sage work by creating an account at
cocalc.com
and working in a Sage worksheet. -
There is a page of Sage cells at
gvsu.edu/s/0Ng
. The results obtained from evaluating one cell are available in other cells on that page. However, you will lose any work once the page is reloaded.
-
- Creating matrices
-
There are a couple of ways to create matrices. For instance, the matrixcan be created in either of the two following ways.
-
matrix(3, 4, [-2, 3, 0, 4, 1,-2, 1,-3, 0, 2, 3, 0])
-
matrix([ [-2, 3, 0, 4], [ 1,-2, 1,-3], [ 0, 2, 3, 0] ])
Be aware that Sage can treat mathematically equivalent matrices in different ways depending on how they are entered. For instance, the matrixmatrix([ [1, 2], [2, 1] ])
has integer entries whilematrix([ [1.0, 2.0], [2.0, 1.0] ])
has floating point entries.If you would like the entries to be considered as floating point numbers, you can includeRDF
in the definition of the matrix.matrix(RDF, [ [1, 2], [2, 1] ])
-
- Special matrices
- The
identity matrix can be created withidentity_matrix(4)
A diagonal matrix can be created from a list of its diagonal entries. For instance,diagonal_matrix([3,-4,2])
- Reduced row echelon form
- The reduced row echelon form of a matrix can be obtained using the
rref()
function. For instance,A = matrix([ [1,2], [2,1] ]) A.rref()
- Vectors
- Addition
- The
+
operator performs vector and matrix addition.v = vector([2,1]) w = vector([-3,2]) print(v+w)
A = matrix([[2,-3],[1,2]]) B = matrix([[-4,1],[3,-1]]) print(A+B)
- Multiplication
-
The
*
operator performs scalar multiplication of vectors and matrices.v = vector([2,1]) print(3*v) A = matrix([[2,1],[-3,2]]) print(3*A)
Similarly, the*
is used for matrix-vector and matrix-matrix multiplication.A = matrix([[2,-3],[1,2]]) v = vector([2,1]) print(A*v) B = matrix([[-4,1],[3,-1]]) print(A*B)
- Operations on vectors
- Operations on matrices
-
Pull out a column of
A
using, for instance,A.column(0)
, which returns the vector that is the first column ofA
. -
The command
A.matrix_from_columns([0,1,2])
returns the matrix formed by the first three columns ofA
.
- Eigenvectors and eigenvalues
-
The eigenvalues of a matrix
A
can be found withA.eigenvalues()
. The number of times that an eigenvalue appears in the list equals its multiplicity. -
The eigenvectors of a matrix having rational entries can be found with
A.eigenvectors_right()
.
-
- Matrix factorizations
-
A singular value decomposition is obtained with
U, Sigma, V = A.SVD()
Itβs important to note that the matrix must be defined usingRDF
. For instance,A = matrix(RDF, 3,2,[1,0,-1,1,1,1])
.