Linear Algebra, 5th Edition

3.4 Systems of Linear Equations—Computational Aspects

In Section 3.3, we obtained a necessary and sufficient condition for a system of linear equations to have solutions (Theorem 3.11 p. 174) and learned how to express the solutions to a nonhomogeneous system in terms of solutions to the corresponding homogeneous system (Theorem 3.9 p. 172). The latter result enables us to determine all the solutions to a given system if we can find one solution to the given system and a basis for the solution set of the corresponding homogeneous system. In this section, we use elementary row operations to accomplish these two objectives simultaneously. The essence of this technique is to transform a given system of linear equations into a system having the same ...