created: 10/18/98; revised 08/01/00, 07/28/03, 07/22/04, 07/25/09
In many fields matrices are used to represent objects and operations on those objects. In computer graphics, points and vectors are represented with column matrices. Square matrices represent operations on those objects.
A column matrix consists of a single column of numbers. Do you think that numbers could be arranged into several rows and several columns?