Many mathematical problems work with sequences of numbers. In many languages they
are called arrays; in Octave they are just examples of vectors. Vectors are commonly
used to represent the three dimensions of a position or a velocity, but a vector is really
just a list of numbers, and this is how Octave treats them. In fact, vectors are a simple
case of a matrix (which is just a two-dimensional grid of numbers). A vector is a matrix
with only one row, or only one column. We will see later that it is often important to
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distinguish between row vectors (· · · ) and column vectors· , but for the moment that
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won’t concern us.