Mastering SciPy

Basic matrix manipulation

The emphasis of the second part of this chapter is on mastering the following operations:

• Scalar multiplication, matrix addition, and matrix multiplication
• Traces and determinants
• Transposes and inverses
• Norms and condition numbers

Scalar multiplication, matrix addition, and matrix multiplication

Let us start with the matrices stored with the ndarray class. We accomplish scalar multiplication with the * operator, and the matrix addition with the + operator. But for matrix multiplication we will need the instance method dot() or the numpy.dot function, since the operator * is reserved for element-wise multiplication:

In [54]: 2*A
Out[54]:
array([[ 2,  4],
       [ 8, 32]])
In [55]: A + 2*A
Out[55]:
array([[ 3,  6],
       [12, 48]])
In [56]: ...