MATRIX
(From
Math Words)
The first mathematical use of the word matrix was around 1850 by
Sylvester. Sylvester saw a matrix as a way of obtaining determinants,
but did not fully realize their potential. Within a year of his first
use of the term he introduced the idea to Cayley who was the first to
publish the inverse of a matrix and treat them as purely abstract
mathematical forms. Sylvester was also the first to use the word "minor"
(see same below) for a smaller matrix. I came across the following
anecdote about Sylvester and didn't know where else to put it:
Sylvester, incidentally, spent a very brief period teaching at the
University of Virginia. It ended after an enraged Sylvester hit a
student reading a newspaper with a stick and fled the country believing
he had killed him.
The use of mathematical arrays to solve problems predates the
application of the name by about 2000 years. Around 200 BC in the
Chinese text Juizhang Suanshu (Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Arts)
the author solves a system of three equations in three unknowns by
placing the coefficients on a counting board and solving by a process
that we today call Gaussian Elimination. Elimination would not become
well known in the West until the beginning of the Nineteenth Century. By
the early 1500's, Cardan states a rule, regula de modo, for solving two
equations in two unknowns by much the same method as Creamer's rule.
The word matrix comes from the same Latin root that gives us mother, and
was used to refer to the womb, and pregnant animals. It became
generalized to mean any situation or substance that contributes to the
origin of something.