[Math] What does “canonical” mean in vector space

geometryinner-productslinear algebraterminology

I was watching this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDkwklFGMfo

And the professor is talking about the inner product… then he brings up the "canonical" representation of the inner product in R^N.

What, specifically, does he mean? I see it a lot in matrix talk, but I'm never really sure what they mean.

Best Answer

It is not the usual terminology. "Canonical" has a well established use in linear algebra as a construction that is independent of a basis, or at least invariant with respect to different choices of basis. The thing in the lecture slides (around 25min in the video) is ordinarily called the "standard" inner product associated to a basis, or the "Euclidean" inner product.

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