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There is, of course, the trivial subspace 0 con- Intersections of subspaces are subspaces.
sisting of the origin 0 alone. And R3 is a subspace We’ll prove that in a moment, but first, for an ex-
of itself. Next, to identify the proper, nontrivial ample to illustrate it, take two distinct planes in
subspaces of R3 . R3 passing through 0. Their intersection is a line
Every line through the origin is a subspace of R3 passing through 0, so it’s a subspace, too.
for the same reason that lines through the origin
were subspaces of R2 . Theorem 3. The intersection of two subspaces of
The other subspaces of R3 are the planes pass- a vector space is a subspace itself.
ing through the origin. Let W be a plane passing We’ll develop a proof of this theorem in class.
through 0. We need (1) 0 ∈ W , but we have that Note that the union of two subspaces won’t be a
since we’re only considering planes that contain 0. subspace (except in the special case when one hap-
Next, we need (2) W is closed under vector addi- pens to be contained in the other, in which case the
tion. If w1 and w2 both belong to W , then so does union is the larger one). For an example of that,
w1 + w2 because it’s found by constructing a par- consider the x-axis and the y-axis in R2 . They’re
allelogram, and the whole parallelogram lies in the both subspaces of R2 , but their union is not a sub-
plane W . Finally, we need (3) W is closed under space of R2 . Why not?
scalar products, but it is since scalar multiples lie
in a straight line through the origin, and that line Math 130 Home Page at
lies in W . Thus, each plane W passing through the http://math.clarku.edu/~djoyce/ma130/
origin is a subspace of R3 .