Dual space by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
The dual space of a vector space , sometimes denoted , is the vector space of all linear forms over with the obvious addition and scalar multiplication operations defined.
Since a linear form is completely determined by how it acts on a basis, and since for each basis element it is specified by a scalar, at least in finite dimension, the dimension of the dual space is the same as the , and so they are isomorphic because all vector spaces of the same dimension on a given field are isomorphic, and so the dual is quite a boring concept in the context of finite dimension.
One place where duals are different from the non-duals however is when dealing with tensors, because they transform differently than vectors from the base space .
Besides the understandable Wikipedia definition, Video "Simple Groups - Abstract Algebra by Socratica (2018)" gives an understandable one:
Given a finite group and a simple group , find all groups such that is a normal subgroup of and .
In particular, this is hard because you can't just take the direct product of groups to retrieve the original group: Section "Relationship between the quotient group and direct products".
Finite field by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
A convenient notation for the elements of of prime order is to use integers, e.g. for we could write:
which makes it clear what is the additive inverse of each element, although sometimes a notation starting from 0 is also used:
For fields of prime order, regular modular arithmetic works as the field operation.
For non-prime order, we see that modular arithmetic does not work because the divisors have no inverse. E.g. at order 6, 2 and 3 have no inverse, e.g. for 2:
we see that things wrap around perfecly, and 1 is never reached.
For non-prime prime power orders however, we can find a way, see finite field of non-prime order.
Video 1.
Finite fields made easy by Randell Heyman (2015)
Source. Good introduction with examples
Lebesgue integral by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli sometimes wonders how much someone can gain from learning this besides the beauty of mathematics, since we can hand-wave a Lebesgue integral on almost anything that is of practical use. The beauty is good reason enough though.

Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

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