MATH 4A - Linear Algebra With Applications

Finishing up determinant as volume Application 1: Network Flow Application 2: webgraph Application 3: Diet design
MATH 4A - Linear Algebra with Applications

Lecture 13: Applications!
29 April 2019
Reading: §1.6, §1.10, and §4.1 from Lay, 5th ed.

Recommended problems from §1.6: 11, 13
Recommended problems from §1.10: 1, 9, 11
Lecture plan
1 Finishing up determinant as volume
2 Application 1: Network Flow
3 Application 2: webgraph
4 Application 3: Diet design

See board
iClicker 1
Determine the volume of the 3-dimensional parallelepiped

determined by the three vectors
     
1 3 0
2 2 0
3 1 1
(a) -4
(b) Not enough information to say
(c) 8
(d) 4
(e) -8
Networks
A network is a set of junctions, or nodes, together with lines or

arcs connecting the nodes called branches. The branches have
arrows on them to indicate which direction the network flows.
Sometimes we label each branch with a number to indicate that a

certain amount of “stuff” is flowing through that branch. (If we
don’t label the branches, we might think of that as labeling them
all with a 1.)
We are often (but not always) interested in conservative networks

in which the amount of stuff flowing into each node is equal to the
amount of stuff flowing out of each node.
There are many interesting questions to ask about a

network
1 Can we recover the behavior of the entire network flow from

just part of the information? (In particular, the “boundary”?)
2 What does a “typical” flow trajectory look like?
3 etc.. . .
Example 1: traffic in downtown Baltimore

After some surveying using those rubber vehicle counting hoses,
the city of Baltimore has acquired the following incomplete data
for its downtown traffic pattern (units are vehicles per hour):
x3 100
300 x4 400
x2 x5
300 x1 600
500
Can the city determine exactly how the traffic behaves from this
data?
It’s reasonable to assume that traffic is (approximately)

conservative. Thus, at each node of the network (which
corresponds to an intersection of two roads), the number of cars
going into that intersection is the same as the number of cars
leaving that intersection. Using this, we can set up a linear system
to try to solve for the unknown data.

x3 100
x4
300 400
x2 x5
300 x1 600
We convert the network 500 into the following
linear system:
300 + 500 = x1 + x2
x1 + x5 = 600
x2 + x4 = 300 + x3
100 + 400 = x4 + x5
which we can rewrite as a matrix vector equation:
 
 x
0 0 0  1
  
1 1 800
1 0 x2   
0 0 1   600
 
 x3  =  
0 1 −1 1 0  x4  300
0 0 0 1 1 500
x
iClicker 2
The echelon form of the associated augmented matrix for the

traffic pattern is
 
1 0 0 0 1 600
 0
 1 0 0 −1 200 

 0 0 1 0 0 400 
0 0 0 1 1 500
We wanted to know if the traffic pattern was uniquely determined

by the data that the city had already collected. What do you
think?
(a) Yes, the total traffic pattern is determined.
(b) No, it is not.
The webgraph
The webgraph is a representation of the entire Internet as a

network: there is one node for each webpage, and a branch
pointing from node P to node Q for each time the webpage P has
a hyperlink to Q. We don’t label the branches with flow quantities
(so you can think of all of them as being label by 1s).
Is the webgraph conservative? Discuss!

(a) Yes
(b) No
Example 2: webgraph
This isn’t exactly a “network” representation of the webgraph, but

it is very similar: https://internet-map.net/
Understanding the webgraph is essential for how Google’s

PageRank works. We’ll discuss this more later in the quarter, but
the basic theory underlying it is the following:
1 Start at a random website, and click a random link to another
webpage. Then click another random link. Keep doing this
many times.
2 This random walk generates a probability distribution.
3 The probability that you land at a given webpage P after, say,
a million steps, is the PageRank of that webpage P.
Example 2: webgraph
In fact, instead of literally doing a bunch of random walks to

approximate the probability distribution, there is a better way to
compute the PageRank using eigenvectors, which we’ll discuss later
in the quarter.
Basically, as long as Google has a good approximation to the

webgraph (which it generates by indexing the internet), it can
efficiently approximate the PageRank well enough most of the time.
Soylent green is people!
Suppose you want to make a single food that exactly satisfies all of
the various nutritional Recommended Daily Allowances (RDAs)
from the Food and Nutrition Board simultaneously. How would
you do it?
Well, you will have to combine a bunch of different ingredients in

different ratios and solve...
Since nutrients add when you add more ingredients, this is a linear
problem. . . so we can use matrices!
Example 3: nutrient shake
Suppose we have three ingredients: soy protein isolate, peanuts,

and all-purpose flour, which we want to mix to realize the RDAs
for fat, carbs, and protein. Let’s figure out what mixture is
appropriate.
Here’s the nutritional content of the three ingredients, as well as

the RDA for the nutrients (units in the first three columns are
grams per gram, the last column is just grams):
Nutrient soy peanut flour RDA

fat .04 .49 .01 18
carb .08 .16 .76 130
protein .79 .26 .10 56

Each ingredient supplies a “nutrient vector”—namely, the
appropriate column in the table:
     
.04 .49 .01
s = .08 p = .16 f = .76
.79 .26 .1
We must solve the linear system
x1 s + x2 p + x3 f = T
where T is the “target” nutrient vector

 
18
T = 130 .

56
Of course, we solve this problem by forming the augmented matrix

 
.04 .49 .01 18
s p f T = .08 .16 .76 130
.79 .26 .10 56
Then we find the echelon form, which is approximately:

 
1 0 0 40.65
 0 1 0 30.14  .
0 0 1 160.42
This tells us we should have 40.65 grams of soy protein, 30.14

grams of peanuts, and 160.42 grams of flour.
DELICIOUS!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zAFA-hamZ0

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Finishing up determinant as volume Application 1: Network Flow Application 2: webgraph Application 3: Diet design

MATH 4A - Linear Algebra with Applications

Reading: §1.6, §1.10, and §4.1 from Lay, 5th ed.

1 Finishing up determinant as volume

2 Application 1: Network Flow

4 Application 3: Diet design

Determine the volume of the 3-dimensional parallelepiped

A network is a set of junctions, or nodes, together with lines or

Sometimes we label each branch with a number to indicate that a

We are often (but not always) interested in conservative networks

There are many interesting questions to ask about a

1 Can we recover the behavior of the entire network flow from

Example 1: traffic in downtown Baltimore

Example 1: traffic in downtown Baltimore

It’s reasonable to assume that traffic is (approximately)

Example 1: traffic in downtown Baltimore

The echelon form of the associated augmented matrix for the

We wanted to know if the traffic pattern was uniquely determined

The webgraph is a representation of the entire Internet as a

Is the webgraph conservative? Discuss!

This isn’t exactly a “network” representation of the webgraph, but

Understanding the webgraph is essential for how Google’s

In fact, instead of literally doing a bunch of random walks to

Basically, as long as Google has a good approximation to the

Soylent green is people!

Well, you will have to combine a bunch of different ingredients in

Example 3: nutrient shake

Suppose we have three ingredients: soy protein isolate, peanuts,

Here’s the nutritional content of the three ingredients, as well as

Nutrient soy peanut flour RDA

Example 3: nutrient shake

We must solve the linear system

where T is the “target” nutrient vector

Example 3: nutrient shake

Of course, we solve this problem by forming the augmented matrix

Then we find the echelon form, which is approximately:

This tells us we should have 40.65 grams of soy protein, 30.14

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