Customer Reviews

Linear Algebra

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4 star:		(1)
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2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

I found this book to be poorly written and inferior to just about every college-level math textbook I've seen thus far. Definitions, theorems and other concepts are poorly distinguished from plain text. The book also lacks detailed examples that are relevant to the exercises presented.

Another potential frustration is that it uses completely different notation from other linear algebra text commonly used. Furthermore, the notation itself poorly explained.

Essentially, if one is already very familiar with the subject this book may act as a decent, concise, reference. But as a learning tool it fails.

The number of people dissing this book is absurd. This is a great book, at once useful and rigorous, both notation-wise and in terms of proofs. Not only that, notorious institutions use or have used this book.
A fine blend of theory and practice, has proves that resemble those in more theoretical books (and not even as much as a Mathematics student would want), and at the same time uses matrices throughout. Has several real-world applications and a wealth of exercises. But for some students, for some courses, judging from the reactions, it seems to go way over their heads. The author doesn't baby you into "believing" the theorems. I agree with a reader that this book is compromise, but IMHO a good one. The lot of Linear Algebra books can usually be divided into two heaps, one abstract and algebra-oriented, where matrices are just a special case, and another one that is almost matrix-only throughout, usually of more use to engineers and other applied fields. This book tries to bridge that (since there isn't really a "divide"). Some colleges can't afford to cater to all the different needs students have, and end up just lumping the students together in a class. I believe this book is a welcome addition to those students that want a matrix approach, and yet would appreciate a more mature and abstract outlook.
The book, however, does suffer from dense typographical layout. It could use side notes to ease students into some topics or to "translate" notation, and a more relaxed spacing, and there could be more illustrations (where they apply). In short, it needs a makeover. Maybe something in what the Germans call the "American textbook style." Something that screams: "HEY, YO, PAY ATTENTION TO THIS POINT!", because it looks as if there's a substantial percentage of students that won't get it just by solely reading the text.
In order to read this book, you must accustom yourself to a more rigorous notation than the other books (e.g., working with Sigma notation for matrices), which in itself is something one gains from using it; and you also should have taken a decent course in Analytic Geometry. I said course, not something meddled with your Calculus class.
There are nice exercises to be resolved using something like Matlab (or the open source Scilab from INRIA), for instance, regarding applications in graph theory, with "huge" 9x9 matrices.
This book is an intellectually honest endeavor that tries to keep itself afloat the 1 billion books of Linear Algebra for College students that have poor Mathematics.
It's not the best book in the world (haven't found it yet), but it's neither one of the worst, as some responses here will lead you to believe. There should be more books like this. Blame your education (or lack thereof), not the author.

I was one of Terry Lawson's mathematics students at Tulane (where this book is known to be burned or disposed of in creative ways regularly by students at semester's end), albeit not in his Linear Algebra class. (Professor Kalka taught my linear algebra class and, yes, we did use this book.) Hence, I was able to get a bit of perspective on this text from the author.

Linear Algebra is the result of a compromise. At Tulane, only one course in undergraduate linear algebra is offered. The mathematicians and quantum physicists thus have to take the same course as the engineers. This necessitated more focus on computation and manipulation of matrices than in a traditional class for mathematicians, and more focus on "real" linear algebra than in a typical engineering class. No text existed at the time which bridged the math/engineering gap; Lawson's class was taught from xeroxed notes until they were published it book form.

In my opinion, this is a failed compromise. The mathematical content is obscured by all of the matrices and worked examples. The tensor product and most higher geometrical algebra is omitted. Many pages are devoted to circuits, yet none are given over to the basic formalism of quantum mechanics and so strong is the emphasis on matrices that little space is devoted to the manipulation of general linear operators. Additionally, it doesn't seem like the book was intended to be read--there is no flow, and Lawson gives no sense of what is important or why; theorems are given, proved, and then barely discussed.

However, it does have its strong points. Perhaps in order to make it accessible to first or second year engineering students who couldn't care less, the math is written at such an elementary level that, when used as a reference, this book has a clarifying effect. Additionally, the chapter on digraph theory and the Leontief input-output method was interesting and clearly written. Perhaps the strongest aspect of this book is the MATLAB examples book written to accompany it; the exercises were most enlightening.

Overall, this book is a dud--class notes in overglorified form--but you may find a used copy a handy thing to keep on the bookshelf.

I am a student in the University of Waterloo Faculty of Mathematics, and in the four terms the department has used this book, every professor had problems with this text. If you must use this book, make sure you have extensive supplementary notes to fill in the numerous wild leaps in Lawson's "proofs". It's as if the author wrote the book and then cut out half of it to get it to fit in this slim volume. This book is by no means suitable for an introductory course, and its elementary topics make it unsuitable for everything else.

I thought that my department was the only one to use this book since the author is a part of it, but apparently there are at least two other people who have. The text is completely useless to be used as an introduction to linear algebra. A few goodies are contained in it, but they can be found in any other book on linear algebra. I recommend avoiding this book at all costs.

This is one of the most "condenced" version of Linear Algebra Textbook I have ever read. Everything you learn in first two years of Linear Algebra is confined into 6 extremely long chapters. This book is extremely misleading and confusing -- ten line definitions (keeps blah blah blah) -- and no 'worked-out' examples. When I first read it, cannot distinguish between "examples" and "Theorems". If you are new to Linear Algebra, don't buy it -- it will be just a big waste of money ($90 useless text). If you really want to learn, I would suggest the linear algebra book by McGraw-Hill (Schaum's Series -- Linear Algebra).

Lawson's textbook is absolutely terrible. The book provides hardly any examples, and the few examples it does provide make giant leaps in calculations and steps. In addition to the two supplementary manuals to this textbook, Lawson should have another manual devoted solely to apologies for the Math department's monopolistic imposition of this textbook.

Tulane University math department makes us use this book for Linear Algebra. It was written by one of our professors here, Dr. Lawson.

It contains about 1 in every 10 or 20 solutions to the problems. You will have no way of knowing if you're doing anything right. The explanations are sparse, poorly written, difficult to understand. Basically, the book is a hopeless mess, and let me tell you, the solutions manual doesn't help. Dr. Lawson himself doesn't even have all the solutions; if you ask him, all he gives you is the "Student Solutions Manual" which has 1 in every 5 answers. Oh, and the book has a huge amount of mistakes and typos, some of which are fixed by the solutions manual.

Here at Tulane, math students know this book very well, and NOT A SINGLE STUDENT who has taken the class has ever NOT HATED this book.

This book is the required text for one of my 2nd year university mathematics papers. The reality is that, compared with others (Elementary Linear Algebra (Anton), A First Course in Linear Algebra (Moore, Yaqub) come to mind) the book is hard to read. The author jumps from A to C without mentioning B (except in the problems), there is a lack of visual clarity (sentences go on for ages, there is a lack of white space, few diagrams etc), sentences that are so obtuse that you have to read them a dozen times to understand what they mean, (after reading the next sentence another dozen times you've forgotten the previous sentence). The dearth of worked examples is telling. In other words, a whole lot of frustration. The reason for all this is given in the preface: this book is actually lecture notes that the author wrote in the course of his work. As we all know, lecture notes are too concise to be used all by themselves. If you have to buy this book, be sure to have a few others handy because I guarantee that you're going to need them. Your money could be better spent on many other things.

The notation is horrible and most of the time is not explained. It is so bad, that most of the time, it makes the book unusable. Sometimes, it actually was worse to use the book as a reference. It skipped whole proofs and never gave examples that never corresponded to the homework. Sadly, my professor tried to correspond his lectures to the book, but the book was so bad, I don't think I learned a thing. Plus, since the author is in the department here, the school is still going to use it. AVOID AT ALL COSTS.