On Sun, Oct 26, 1997 at 06:42:14PM -0600, Jim Choate wrote:
I do believe the use of the term this way was inspired by the notion of a 'basis' in a vector space -- a set of orthogonal vectors that span the space, ideally, unit vectors.
Can you better define the term 'basis'?
This is basic linear algebra: V a vector space -- the set of all (s1,s2,s3,...,sn), where si is an element of the set of reals. A set of vectors {v1,v2,...,vm} in V is linearly independent if there is no set of scalars {c1,c2,...,cm} with at least one non-zero element such that sum(ci*vi) == 0. A set of vectors S spans a vector space V iff every element of V can be expressed as a linear combination of the elements of S. Finally, a basis for V is a linearly independent set of vectors in V that spans V. A space is finite dimensioned if it has a finite set for a basis. The standard basis (or natural basis) for a vector space of dimension n is th set of vectors (1,0,0,...0) (0,1,0,...0) (0,0,1,...0)