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I'm solving linear equations with matrices right now and I wonder, how did it start.

Who, how, why came to idea that such kind of equations could be solved with matrices? What was first: matrix or linear equation? How did they found each other?

Will be glad, if anybody is able to answer my question.

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    It is interesting to note that the Chinese knew about Gaussian elimination way before Gauss started to think about his algorithm. See [this](http://books.google.com/books?id=V7mxZqjs5yUC&pg=PA89) for instance.2011-10-20
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    This is information may be incorrect at times, I think I got it from E.T.Bell's *Men of Mathematics* and an (french) exercice book. Gauss already used 3 by 3 arrays of numbers to describe maps, and I think his student Eisenstein introduced the notation $\frac{1}{S}$ to denote the inverse of $S$, but that notation was later abandoned.2011-10-20
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    You can also have a look at [this](http://www.ams.org/bookstore/pspdf/mawrld-27-prev.pdf)2011-10-20

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These links: http://ualr.edu/lasmoller/matrices.html and http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~vitulli/441.sp04/LinAlgHistory.html have some info on this :)

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    Lissa, maybe you could let us know what you find unclear in those references and then we could help.2011-10-20