I tutor several people in a "Mathematics for the Social Sciences" course at a local university. This semester the material is focused on matrix algebra. For the most part, they have no trouble wrapping their heads around the notions of basic vector operations, row reduction, systems of equations, inverse matrices and determinants. But, they have a lot of problems with more abstract concepts such as linear independence, subspaces, basis and dimension. I'm wondering if anyone has any tips on helping them visualize and understand these ideas more clearly.
posted on Mar 30, 2008 - 7 answers

What's the advantage of using radians instead of degrees? I've never had a satisfactory answer to this. In high school, we always used degrees to measure angles and starting in university we switch to radians. Is there really any benefit to using radians?
posted on Mar 9, 2008 - 15 answers