ABSTRACT
Physicists probably encountered vectors in their very first physics course, as soon as they discussed motion in more than one dimension. This chapter shows physicists how to define vectors, and how to work with operations on them and between them. Like vectors, matrices are also useful for representing physical quantities. The chapter reviews some of these physics concepts, and shows physicists how to use Mathematica to represent them and work with them. The mathematical concepts of eigenvalues, eigenvectors, and matrix diagonalization turn out to be especially relevant in physics. Sometimes physicists may want to perform operations on the elements of vector or matrix, that is, an operation on the elements of a list. There are a host of matrix operation commands that do exactly what physicists would expect them to do. Eigenvalue problems probably represent the most important way that matrices are used in Physics. Finding the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of a particular matrix is simple in Mathematica.
