For a general introduction to the LinearAlgebra subpackage of the Student package and a list of the linear algebra interactive routines, see Student:-LinearAlgebra.

There are two ways to use the tutors in the Student:-LinearAlgebra subpackage:

Open a Maplet application, which allows you to work interactively through a particular type of linear algebra problem.

Produce the step-by-step solutions for the linear algebra problem.

The inputs to these commands are Matrices, or Matrices and Vectors.  If entries in these inputs are floating-point numbers, they are converted to rational form before computation proceeds.  This is done because the algorithms used to compute with matrices with floating-point (that is, approximate) values are different from those used for matrices whose entries are exact.

However, due to space constraints, if an answer obtained through exact calculations grows too large, the Maplet application displays a floating-point approximation to that exact answer (computed by applying evalf).  The underlying computations continue to use the exact form of the answer.

The following is a list of the available Student:-LinearAlgebra tutors.