[Numpy-discussion] Matrix-SIG archives

[konrad.hinsen at laposte.net]

On Jan 13, 2005, at 2:02, Robert Kern wrote:

> does anyone have the early archives sitting around somewhere? I'm 
> trying to answer a question about the motivations of a particular 
> design decision in Numeric (why dot(A,B) doesn't do conjugation on A 
> when A is complex).

I don't have the archives either, but I can answer that one from 
memory. The fundamental decision was to separate the concepts of 
"array" (structured collection of data items of identical type) and 
"vector", "matrix" or "tensor" (mathematical objects with specific 
properties that are numerically represented by arrays). Arrays are just 
that, their operations are defined in terms of operations on their 
element. Numeric.dot() does multiplication followed by summing on the 
last dimension of the first argument and the first dimension of the 
second, no matter what type the elements have.

Konrad.
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Konrad Hinsen
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