“If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.”

— Albert Einstein

I am not going to teach you mathematics. I'll just tell you about the use cases of certain topics in our real life. So, let's start with our very first topic, matrix, on this blog.

Definition: Matrix is a boring chapter that we study to pass our board exams.

According to me this is the most appropriate definition of matrix because I cannot remember when did I use the definition last time.

If you are a mathematics student you probably know how to write a matrix. If you can't remember then here is one example for you.

Now let's see if matrix can help us in real life or it was better as a movie. Let's see an example.

Example:

Let's assume Mr. Jhalmuriwala runs a Candy shop and he sells 3 types of candies, Tutti Fruti, Strawberry belt & Marshmallow and their prices are 120, 140 & 90 respectively. He opens his shop from Monday to Friday. Now his problem is he is not able to keep track of daily total sales. So he came to us and gave us his total sales for a week.

Day	Tutti fruti	Strawberry belt	Marshmallow
Monday	10	12	11
Tuesday	20	55	83
Wednesday	73	78	94
Thursday	35	96	59
Friday	21	35	12

Problem: From the above table find out daily sales amount.

Solution: Let's try to convert the above table into a matrix. I think it should look like this: also let's make a matrix of the prices:

[ 120     140     90 ]

Now we are trying to multiply these two matrices. Let's check the criteria for matrix multiplication. The order of the first matrix is 5x3 and the second matrix is 1x3 so the multiplication is not possible. That's why we are transposing the second matrix to change the order to 3x1. Now our second matrix looks like this:

Now if we multiply those two matrices we'll get a new matrix of 5x1 which will look like the following:

Wonderful! we got a new column matrix Can you guess what is this? Let me tell you, we got the daily total sales. If we add another column to the sales tables we can clearly see the daily sales

Day	Tutti fruti	Strawberry belt	Marshmallow	Total Sales
Monday	10	12	11	3870
Tuesday	20	55	83	17570
Wednesday	73	78	94	28140
Thursday	35	96	59	22950
Friday	21	35	12	8640

Note: Do not interchange the columns or rows, it can change the whole data.

Now let's have a look at proper definition of Matrix that we have memorised for marks.

Definition: In mathematics, a matrix is a rectangular array of numbers, symbols, or expressions whose number of rows may or may not be equal to the number of columns.

I hope this helps you to understand how we can apply matrix in our real life. If this helps let me know because the best is yet to come.