Mathematics desk
< October 1	<< Sep \| October \| Nov >>	Current desk >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Mathematics Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

October 2

Span - definition of the term

Hi there,

Reading an article on Spherical Harmonics I ran into a formula:

V_{l}=\operatorname {Span} (Y_{l}^{-l},Y_{l}^{-l+1},....,Y_{l}^{l-1},Y_{l}^{l})

I wonder if there is a strict definition for the term Span? It is sort of self-explanatory and at the same time it is "slippery." I could not find it among math terminology.

Thanks, - --AboutFace 22 (talk) 16:19, 2 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I didn't look at your article, but it's probably linear span. Staecker (talk) 16:48, 2 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

If you look at the section Connection with representation theory in out article Spherical harmonics it discusses the point from the paper.Phoenixia1177 (talk) 05:20, 3 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Phoenixia1177. thank you for the pointer. Although I have seen the Spherical Harmonics article before a number of times I never really focused on the section you mention and now I found a few quite important assertions there. --AboutFace 22 (talk) 19:29, 3 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]