An interactive introduction to MATLAB

8 basic concepts

array withmrows andncolumns is called a matrix of sizem×n. Listings 1.7–

1.10 demonstrate how to create row and column vectors, and matrices in

MATLAB.

Listing 1.7: Creating a row vector

1 >> x = [1 2 3]

2 x =

3 1 2 3

• Square brackets are used to denote a vector or matrix.


• Spaces are used to denote columns.

Listing 1.8: Creating a column vector

1 >> y = [4; 5; 6]

2 y =

3 4

4 5

5 6

• The semicolon operator is used to separate columns.

Listing 1.9: The transpose operator

1 >> x'

2 ans =

3 1

4 2

5 3

7 >> y'

8 ans =

9 4 5 6

• The single quotation mark'transposes arrays, i.e. the rows and columns
  are interchanged so that the first column becomes the first row etc...

A more efficient method for entering vectors, especially those that con-

tain many values, is to use ranges. Instead of entering each individual value

separately, a range of values can be defined as shown in Listing 1.10.