Span
Linear Combinations Revisited
Recall that a vector is said to be a linear combination of vectors if for some scalars .
We write the system in augmented matrix form and apply elementary row operations to bring it to reduced row-echelon form.
This shows that and , and we can express as a linear combination of and as follows:
Observe that because vector is a linear combination of and , is the diagonal of a parallelogram whose sides are scalar multiples of and . As such, lies in the same plane as and , as illustrated below.
item:spanintro2 We need to solve the following vector equation: This equation corresponds to the system:
Writing the system in augmented matrix form and applying elementary row operations gives us the following reduced row-echelon form: We conclude that there are no solutions, and is not a linear combination of and .
Geometrically, this means that is not the diagonal of any parallelogram whose sides are scalar multiples of and . Thus, does not lie in the plane determined by and .
In part item:spanintro1 of Example ex:spanintro we expressed as a linear combination of and , and concluded that lies in the plane determined by and . We say that is in the span of and . In fact, every vector in the plane determined by and is in the span of and . We say that and span the plane.
In contrast, vector of part item:spanintro2 of Example ex:spanintro is not a linear combination of and . We say that is not in the span of and .
The following video takes another look at Example ex:spanintro using our new vocabulary.
Definition of Span
Geometrically, we can use Procedure pro:lincombgeo to express any vector of as a linear combination of and , indicating that the two vectors span all of .
To verify this claim algebraically we will show that an arbitrary vector of can be written as a linear combination of and .
Consider the vector equation:
This corresponds to the system:
Writing the system in augmented matrix form and applying elementary row operations gives us the following reduced row-echelon form: This shows that every vector of can be written as a linear combination of and :
We conclude that
The span of and consists of elements of the form
Geometrically, we can interpret all such linear combinations as diagonals of parallelograms determined by scalar multiples of and . All such diagonals will lie in the plane determined by and . Let this plane be called . A portion of is shown below.
Because Procedure pro:lincombgeo can be applied to vectors that lie in just as easily as it can be applied to vectors of , we conclude that every vector in can be expressed as a linear combination of and . Thus,