This is going to be a very short chapter.  The main topic of this chapter will be the Eigenvalues and Eigenvectors section.  In this section we will be looking at special situations where given a square matrix A and a vector x the product Ax will be the same as the scalar multiplication  for some scalar, .  This idea has important applications in many areas of math and science and so we put it into a chapter of its own.

We’ll also have a quick review of determinants since those will be required in order to do the work in the Eigenvalues and Eigenvectors section.  We’ll also take a look at an application that uses eigenvalues.

Here is a listing of the topics in this chapter.

Review of Determinants  In this section we’ll do a quick review of determinants.

Eigenvalues and Eigenvectors  Here we will take a look at the main section in this chapter.  We’ll be looking at the concept of Eigenvalues and Eigenvectors.

Diagonalization  We’ll be looking at diagonalizable matrices in this section.