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Outer Product


The outer product of column vectors u in K^m and v in K^n over a field K is the m×n matrix

 uv^T=[u_1v_1 ... u_1v_n; | ... |; u_mv_1 ... u_mv_n].

Thus its (i,j)th entry is u_iv_j. Over the complex numbers, some authors use the conjugate transpose uv^_^T instead, especially when the outer product is associated with an inner product.

An outer-product matrix has matrix rank at most 1, and has matrix rank 1 when both vectors are nonzero. The outer product is the matrix representation of the tensor product u tensor v after bases have been chosen.


See also

Inner Product, Matrix Rank, Tensor Product, Transpose, Vector Direct Product

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References

Horn, R. A. and Johnson, C. R. Matrix Analysis, 2nd ed. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Cite this as:

Weisstein, Eric W. "Outer Product." From MathWorld--A Wolfram Resource. https://mathworld.wolfram.com/OuterProduct.html

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