In
mathematicsMathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...
,
multilinear algebra extends the methods of
linear algebraLinear algebra is a branch of mathematics that studies vector spaces, also called linear spaces, along with linear functions that input one vector and output another. Such functions are called linear maps and can be represented by matrices if a basis is given. Thus matrix theory is often...
. Just as linear algebra is built on the concept of a
vectorA vector space is a mathematical structure formed by a collection of vectors: objects that may be added together and multiplied by numbers, called scalars in this context. Scalars are often taken to be real numbers, but one may also consider vector spaces with scalar multiplication by complex...
and develops the theory of
vector spaceA vector space is a mathematical structure formed by a collection of vectors: objects that may be added together and multiplied by numbers, called scalars in this context. Scalars are often taken to be real numbers, but one may also consider vector spaces with scalar multiplication by complex...
s, multilinear algebra builds on the concepts of p-vectors and
multivectorIn multilinear algebra, a multivector or clif is an element of the exterior algebra on a vector space, \Lambda^* V. This algebra consists of linear combinations of simple k-vectors v_1\wedge\cdots\wedge v_k."Multivector" may mean either homogeneous elements In multilinear algebra, a multivector...
s with Grassmann algebra.
Origin
In a vector space of dimension
n, one usually considers only the vectors. According to
Hermann GrassmannHermann Günther Grassmann was a German polymath, renowned in his day as a linguist and now also admired as a mathematician. He was also a physicist, neohumanist, general scholar, and publisher...
and others, this presumption misses the complexity of considering the structures of pairs, triples, and general multivectors. Since there are several combinatorial possibilities, the space of multivectors turns out to have 2
n dimensions. The abstract formulation of the determinant is the most immediate application.
Multilinear algebra also has applications in mechanical study of material response to stress and strain with various moduli of elasticity. This practical reference led to the use of the word
tensorTensors are geometric objects that describe linear relations between vectors, scalars, and other tensors. Elementary examples include the dot product, the cross product, and linear maps. Vectors and scalars themselves are also tensors. A tensor can be represented as a multi-dimensional array of...
to describe the elements of the multilinear space. The extra structure in a multilinear space has led it to play an important role in various studies in higher mathematics. Though Grassmann started the subject in 1844 with his
Ausdehnungslehre, and re-published in 1862, his work was slow to find acceptance as ordinary linear algebra provided sufficient challenges to comprehension.
The topic of multilinear algebra is applied in some studies of multivariate calculus and
manifoldIn mathematics , a manifold is a topological space that on a small enough scale resembles the Euclidean space of a specific dimension, called the dimension of the manifold....
s where the Jacobian matrix comes into play. The infinitesimal differentials of single variable calculus become differential forms in multivariate calculus, and their manipulation is done with
exterior algebraIn mathematics, the exterior product or wedge product of vectors is an algebraic construction used in Euclidean geometry to study areas, volumes, and their higher-dimensional analogs...
.
After some preliminary work by
Elwin Bruno ChristoffelElwin Bruno Christoffel was a German mathematician and physicist.-Life:...
, a major advance in multilinear algebra came in the work of
Gregorio Ricci-CurbastroGregorio Ricci-Curbastro was an Italian mathematician. He was born at Lugo di Romagna. He is most famous as the inventor of the tensor calculus but published important work in many fields....
and
Tullio Levi-CivitaTullio Levi-Civita, FRS was an Italian mathematician, most famous for his work on absolute differential calculus and its applications to the theory of relativity, but who also made significant contributions in other areas. He was a pupil of Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro, the inventor of tensor calculus...
(see references). It was the
absolute differential calculus form of multilinear algebra that Marcel Grossman and
Michele BessoMichele Angelo Besso was a Swiss/Italian engineer of Jewish Italian descent. He was a close friend of Albert Einstein during his years at the Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zurich, today the ETH Zurich, and then at the patent office in Bern...
introduced to
Albert EinsteinAlbert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of general relativity, effecting a revolution in physics. For this achievement, Einstein is often regarded as the father of modern physics and one of the most prolific intellects in human history...
. The publication in 1915 by Einstein of a
general relativityGeneral relativity or the general theory of relativity is the geometric theory of gravitation published by Albert Einstein in 1916. It is the current description of gravitation in modern physics...
explanation for the precession of the perihelion of Mercury, established multilinear algebra and
tensorTensors are geometric objects that describe linear relations between vectors, scalars, and other tensors. Elementary examples include the dot product, the cross product, and linear maps. Vectors and scalars themselves are also tensors. A tensor can be represented as a multi-dimensional array of...
s as important mathematics.
Use in algebraic topology
Around the middle of the 20th century the study of tensors was reformulated more abstractly. The
BourbakiNicolas Bourbaki is the collective pseudonym under which a group of 20th-century mathematicians wrote a series of books presenting an exposition of modern advanced mathematics, beginning in 1935. With the goal of founding all of mathematics on set theory, the group strove for rigour and generality...
group's treatise
Multilinear Algebra was especially influential — in fact the term
multilinear algebra was probably coined there.
One reason at the time was a new area of application,
homological algebraHomological algebra is the branch of mathematics which studies homology in a general algebraic setting. It is a relatively young discipline, whose origins can be traced to investigations in combinatorial topology and abstract algebra at the end of the 19th century, chiefly by Henri Poincaré and...
. The development of
algebraic topologyAlgebraic topology is a branch of mathematics which uses tools from abstract algebra to study topological spaces. The basic goal is to find algebraic invariants that classify topological spaces up to homeomorphism, though usually most classify up to homotopy equivalence.Although algebraic topology...
during the 1940s gave additional incentive for the development of a purely algebraic treatment of the
tensor productIn mathematics, the tensor product, denoted by ⊗, may be applied in different contexts to vectors, matrices, tensors, vector spaces, algebras, topological vector spaces, and modules, among many other structures or objects. In each case the significance of the symbol is the same: the most general...
. The computation of the
homology groupsIn mathematics , homology is a certain general procedure to associate a sequence of abelian groups or modules with a given mathematical object such as a topological space or a group...
of the
productIn topology and related areas of mathematics, a product space is the cartesian product of a family of topological spaces equipped with a natural topology called the product topology...
of two
spacesTopological spaces are mathematical structures that allow the formal definition of concepts such as convergence, connectedness, and continuity. They appear in virtually every branch of modern mathematics and are a central unifying notion...
involves the tensor product; but only in the simplest cases, such as a
torusIn geometry, a torus is a surface of revolution generated by revolving a circle in three dimensional space about an axis coplanar with the circle...
, is it directly calculated in that fashion (see
Künneth theoremIn mathematics, especially in homological algebra and algebraic topology, a Künneth theorem is a statement relating the homology of two objects to the homology of their product. The classical statement of the Künneth theorem relates the singular homology of two topological spaces X and Y and their...
). The topological phenomena were subtle enough to need better foundational concepts; technically speaking, the Tor functors had to be defined.
The material to organise was quite extensive, including also ideas going back to
Hermann GrassmannHermann Günther Grassmann was a German polymath, renowned in his day as a linguist and now also admired as a mathematician. He was also a physicist, neohumanist, general scholar, and publisher...
, the ideas from the theory of
differential formIn the mathematical fields of differential geometry and tensor calculus, differential forms are an approach to multivariable calculus that is independent of coordinates. Differential forms provide a better definition for integrands in calculus...
s that had led to
De Rham cohomologyIn mathematics, de Rham cohomology is a tool belonging both to algebraic topology and to differential topology, capable of expressing basic topological information about smooth manifolds in a form particularly adapted to computation and the concrete representation of cohomology classes...
, as well as more elementary ideas such as the wedge product that generalises the
cross productIn mathematics, the cross product, vector product, or Gibbs vector product is a binary operation on two vectors in three-dimensional space. It results in a vector which is perpendicular to both of the vectors being multiplied and normal to the plane containing them...
.
The resulting rather severe write-up of the topic (by Bourbaki) entirely rejected one approach in vector calculus (the
quaternionIn mathematics, the quaternions are a number system that extends the complex numbers. They were first described by Irish mathematician Sir William Rowan Hamilton in 1843 and applied to mechanics in three-dimensional space...
route, that is, in the general case, the relation with Lie groups). They instead applied a novel approach using
category theoryCategory theory is an area of study in mathematics that examines in an abstract way the properties of particular mathematical concepts, by formalising them as collections of objects and arrows , where these collections satisfy certain basic conditions...
, with the Lie group approach viewed as a separate matter. Since this leads to a much cleaner treatment, there was probably no going back in purely mathematical terms. (Strictly, the
universal propertyIn various branches of mathematics, a useful construction is often viewed as the “most efficient solution” to a certain problem. The definition of a universal property uses the language of category theory to make this notion precise and to study it abstractly.This article gives a general treatment...
approach was invoked; this is somewhat more general than category theory, and the relationship between the two as alternate ways was also being clarified, at the same time.)
Indeed what was done is almost precisely to explain that
tensor spaces are the constructions required to reduce multilinear problems to linear problems. This purely algebraic attack conveys no geometric intuition.
Its benefit is that by re-expressing problems in terms of multilinear algebra, there is a clear and well-defined 'best solution': the constraints the solution exerts are exactly those you need in practice. In general there is no need to invoke any
ad hoc construction, geometric idea, or recourse to co-ordinate systems. In the category-theoretic jargon, everything is entirely
natural.
Conclusion on the abstract approach
In principle the abstract approach can recover everything done via the traditional approach. In practice this may not seem so simple. On the other hand the notion of
natural is consistent with the
general covarianceIn theoretical physics, general covariance is the invariance of the form of physical laws under arbitrary differentiable coordinate transformations...
principle of
general relativityGeneral relativity or the general theory of relativity is the geometric theory of gravitation published by Albert Einstein in 1916. It is the current description of gravitation in modern physics...
. The latter deals with
tensor fieldIn mathematics, physics and engineering, a tensor field assigns a tensor to each point of a mathematical space . Tensor fields are used in differential geometry, algebraic geometry, general relativity, in the analysis of stress and strain in materials, and in numerous applications in the physical...
s (tensors varying from point to point on a
manifoldIn mathematics , a manifold is a topological space that on a small enough scale resembles the Euclidean space of a specific dimension, called the dimension of the manifold....
), but covariance asserts that the language of tensors is essential to the proper formulation of general relativity.
Some decades later the rather abstract view coming from category theory was tied up with the approach that had been developed in the 1930s by
Hermann WeylHermann Klaus Hugo Weyl was a German mathematician and theoretical physicist. Although much of his working life was spent in Zürich, Switzerland and then Princeton, he is associated with the University of Göttingen tradition of mathematics, represented by David Hilbert and Hermann Minkowski.His...
(in his book
The Classical Groups). In a way this took the theory full circle, connecting once more the content of old and new viewpoints.
Topics in multilinear algebra
The subject matter of multilinear algebra has evolved less than the presentation down the years. Here are further pages centrally relevant to it:
- tensor
Tensors are geometric objects that describe linear relations between vectors, scalars, and other tensors. Elementary examples include the dot product, the cross product, and linear maps. Vectors and scalars themselves are also tensors. A tensor can be represented as a multi-dimensional array of...
- dual space
In mathematics, any vector space, V, has a corresponding dual vector space consisting of all linear functionals on V. Dual vector spaces defined on finite-dimensional vector spaces can be used for defining tensors which are studied in tensor algebra...
- bilinear operator
In mathematics, a bilinear operator is a function combining elements of two vector spaces to yield an element of a third vector space that is linear in each of its arguments. Matrix multiplication is an example.-Definition:...
- inner product
- multilinear map
- Exterior algebra
In mathematics, the exterior product or wedge product of vectors is an algebraic construction used in Euclidean geometry to study areas, volumes, and their higher-dimensional analogs...
- Cramer's rule
In linear algebra, Cramer's rule is a theorem, which gives an expression for the solution of a system of linear equations with as many equations as unknowns, valid in those cases where there is a unique solution...
- component-free treatment of tensors
- Kronecker delta
- tensor contraction
In multilinear algebra, a tensor contraction is an operation on one or more tensors that arises from the natural pairing of a finite-dimensional vector space and its dual. In components, it is expressed as a sum of products of scalar components of the tensor caused by applying the summation...
- mixed tensor
In tensor analysis, a mixed tensor is a tensor which is neither strictly covariant nor strictly contravariant; at least one of the indices of a mixed tensor will be a subscript and at least one of the indices will be a superscript ....
- Levi-Civita symbol
The Levi-Civita symbol, also called the permutation symbol, antisymmetric symbol, or alternating symbol, is a mathematical symbol used in particular in tensor calculus...
- tensor algebra
In mathematics, the tensor algebra of a vector space V, denoted T or T•, is the algebra of tensors on V with multiplication being the tensor product...
, free algebraIn mathematics, especially in the area of abstract algebra known as ring theory, a free algebra is the noncommutative analogue of a polynomial ring .-Definition:...
- symmetric algebra
In mathematics, the symmetric algebra S on a vector space V over a field K is the free commutative unital associative algebra over K containing V....
, symmetric power
- exterior derivative
In differential geometry, the exterior derivative extends the concept of the differential of a function, which is a 1-form, to differential forms of higher degree. Its current form was invented by Élie Cartan....
- Einstein notation
In mathematics, especially in applications of linear algebra to physics, the Einstein notation or Einstein summation convention is a notational convention useful when dealing with coordinate formulae...
- symmetric tensor
- metric tensor
In the mathematical field of differential geometry, a metric tensor is a type of function defined on a manifold which takes as input a pair of tangent vectors v and w and produces a real number g in a way that generalizes many of the familiar properties of the dot product of vectors in Euclidean...
There is also a
glossary of tensor theoryThis is a glossary of tensor theory. For expositions of tensor theory from different points of view, see:* Tensor* Tensor * Application of tensor theory in engineering science...
.
From the point of view of applications
Some of the ways in which multilinear algebra concepts are applied:
- classical treatment of tensors
- dyadic tensor
In multilinear algebra, a dyadic is a second rank tensor written in a special notation, formed by juxtaposing pairs of vectors, along with a notation for manipulating such expressions analogous to the rules for matrix algebra....
- bra-ket notation
Bra-ket notation is a standard notation for describing quantum states in the theory of quantum mechanics composed of angle brackets and vertical bars. It can also be used to denote abstract vectors and linear functionals in mathematics...
- geometric algebra
Geometric algebra , together with the associated Geometric calculus, provides a comprehensive alternative approach to the algebraic representation of classical, computational and relativistic geometry. GA now finds application in all of physics, in graphics and in robotics...
- Clifford algebra
In mathematics, Clifford algebras are a type of associative algebra. As K-algebras, they generalize the real numbers, complex numbers, quaternions and several other hypercomplex number systems. The theory of Clifford algebras is intimately connected with the theory of quadratic forms and orthogonal...
- pseudoscalar
- pseudovector
In physics and mathematics, a pseudovector is a quantity that transforms like a vector under a proper rotation, but gains an additional sign flip under an improper rotation such as a reflection. Geometrically it is the opposite, of equal magnitude but in the opposite direction, of its mirror image...
- spinor
In mathematics and physics, in particular in the theory of the orthogonal groups , spinors are elements of a complex vector space introduced to expand the notion of spatial vector. Unlike tensors, the space of spinors cannot be built up in a unique and natural way from spatial vectors...
- outer product
In linear algebra, the outer product typically refers to the tensor product of two vectors. The result of applying the outer product to a pair of vectors is a matrix...
- hypercomplex number
In mathematics, a hypercomplex number is a traditional term for an element of an algebra over a field where the field is the real numbers or the complex numbers. In the nineteenth century number systems called quaternions, tessarines, coquaternions, biquaternions, and octonions became established...
- multilinear subspace learning
Multilinear subspace learning aims to learn a specific small part of a large space of multidimensional objects having a particular desired property. It is a dimensionality reduction approach for finding a low-dimensional representation with certain preferred characteristics of high-dimensional...