1.3 Bases

  • Definitions. Let \(\lst {v}1n\) be a list of vectors in a vector space \(V\).

    • (1) The span of \(\lst {v}1n\) is

      \begin{equation*} \Span {\lst {v}1n}:=\set {\lc \lambda {v}1n\st \lambda _i\in \F , 1\leq i\leq n}\leq V. \end{equation*}

    • (2) \(\lst {v}1n\) span \(V\) (or are a spanning list for \(V\)) if \(\Span {\lst {v}1n}=V\).

    • (3) \(\lst {v}1n\) are linearly independent if, whenever \(\lc \lambda {v}1n=0\), then each \(\lambda _i=0\), \(1\leq i\leq n\), and linearly dependent otherwise.

    • (4) \(\lst {v}1n\) is a basis for \(V\) if they are linearly independent and span \(V\).

  • Definition. A vector space is finite-dimensional if it admits a finite list of vectors as basis and infinite-dimensional otherwise.

    If \(V\) is finite-dimensional, the dimension of \(V\), \(\dim V\), is the number of vectors in a (any) basis of \(V\).

  • Proposition 1.1 (Algebra 1B, Proposition 1.3.4). \(\lst {v}1n\) is a basis for \(V\) if and only if any \(v\in V\) can be written in the form

    \begin{equation} \label {eq:1} v=\lc \lambda {v}1n \end{equation}

    for unique \(\lst \lambda 1n\in \F \). In this case, \(\vec \lambda 1n\) is called the coordinate vector of \(v\) with respect to \(\lst {v}1n\).

1.3.1 Standard bases
  • Proposition 1.2. For \(\cI \) a set and \(i\in \cI \), define \(e_i\in \F ^{\cI }\) by

    \begin{equation*} e_i(j)= \begin{cases} 1&\text {if $i=j$}\\0&\text {if $i\neq j$}, \end {cases} \end{equation*}

    for all \(j\in \cI \).

    If \(\cI \) is finite then \((e_i)_{i\in \cI }\) is a basis, called the standard basis, of \(\F ^{\cI }\).

    In particular, \(\dim \F ^{\cI }=\abs {\cI }\).

1.3.2 Useful facts
  • Proposition 1.3 (Algebra 1B, Corollary 1.4.7). Any linearly independent list of vectors in a finite-dimensional vector space can be extended to a basis.

  • Lemma 1.4 (Algebra 1B, Corollary 1.4.6). Let \(V\) be a finite-dimensional vector space and \(U\leq V\). Then

    \begin{equation*} \dim U\leq \dim V \end{equation*}

    with equality if and only if \(U=V\).