Ronn! Blankenship wrote: ... >> But I did know there had to be one. I think >> these are called "affine" transformations. >> (Linear is x --> ax, and Affine is x --> ax + b.) > > y = mx + b is a linear equation. (With slope m and y-intercept b.) > > . . . ronn! :)
Ronn-- Why, yes it is. But "linear transformation" has a different meaning. This is one of those places where usage may differ between simple and advanced Math. Once people got into doing transformations to vector spaces by matrix multiplication, they decided that they wanted to define "T is linear" as "T(ax + by) = a T(x) + b T(y) always holds". Once you do that, T(0) = 0, and you don't get to add a constant as part of a linear transformation. Another place where this kind of thing shows up is in the definition of the natural numbers. Do they start at 0 or at 1? On a basic level, starting at 1 makes sense. But in set theory (or computer science) starting at 0 works better. The crude answer to you would be to say: "Oh, so it means that? Then go edit Wikipedia to say so." See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_transformation That's a great function of Wikipedia--standardizing nomenclature. ---David _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
