Wedge Product, kind of urgent

mikau · 2007-11-11 17:29:13

my linear algebra teacher decided to discuss a topic which doesn't appear in our book and i wasn't able to get much out of his ramblings. I spent some time scanning the web for info but most places that mention it talk about stuff over my head.

I have a test on Tuesday and I KNOW he's going to have at least one problem on wedge products. Moreover he always includes problems which say "using your result form the previous problem, solve this" he says he does this so that you can catch errors in previous problems, but really it just causes your mistakes to snowball and by the time you realize you screwed up there's not enough time left to fix it.

I HATE THIS TEACHER!

anyway, he's only going to ask us to find the wedge product of a group of vectors in R^n, so it shouldn't be THAT complicated. Also there are one or two related items such as basis and dimension. I'm not sure what vector space these are for but..well i'd like to know!

I'd REALLY REALLY appreciate it if someone can break this down for me.

mikau · 2007-11-12 14:09:29

does no one know how to compute the wedge product?

The wikipedia page is absolutely crazy.

supposedly it involves adjoining two vectors together, and making matrices, and something to do with determinants.

mikau · 2007-11-12 14:58:48

I found a pretty good article on the topic here: http://www.tulane.edu/~ftbirtel/wedge%20product.pdf
but i only understand parts of it.

Mostly because all they say is wedge product of THIS is equal to wedge product of THAT, but never actually tell me what the wedge product is.

Last edited by mikau (2007-11-12 15:08:42)

John E. Franklin · 2007-11-13 14:26:32

This link won't work, but the google cache you can read below...
I don't know what they're talking about, but maybe you will!!

http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:pZ_0KiYvIloJ:66.98.148.43/~xenharmo/wedgie.html+%22wedge+product+is%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=29&gl=us

This PDF seems quite fact-filled.
Again, it's over my head.
Section 7 and 8 start with wedge products in the middle of the PDF.

http://ocw.mit.edu/NR/rdonlyres/Mathematics/18-338JFall-2004/C53D1935-4348-4643-BA74-F3EC9C44A1AD/0/handout6.pdf

Something fun to read with "wedge products" in it:
http://www.lns.cornell.edu/spr/2004-02/msg0058309.html

Last edited by John E. Franklin (2007-11-13 15:37:20)

Math Is Fun Forum

#1 2007-11-11 17:29:13

Wedge Product, kind of urgent

#2 2007-11-12 14:09:29

Re: Wedge Product, kind of urgent

#3 2007-11-12 14:58:48

Re: Wedge Product, kind of urgent

#4 2007-11-13 14:26:32

Re: Wedge Product, kind of urgent

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