MATLAB Array Operations

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MATLAB is an incredibly popular programming language for engineers, scientists, and researchers. One of its most powerful features is its built-in support for array manipulation. In this article, we'll dive into some common array operations in MATLAB, including element-wise operations, array concatenation, and reshaping.

Element-wise Operations

In MATLAB, we can perform element-wise operations on arrays using the .*, ./, and .^ operators. These operators perform multiplication, division, and exponentiation, respectively, on each element of the arrays. Let's see some examples:

A = [1, 2, 3; 4, 5, 6; 7, 8, 9];
B = [9, 8, 7; 6, 5, 4; 3, 2, 1];

% Element-wise multiplication
C = A .* B;
% C = [9, 16, 21; 24, 25, 24; 21, 16, 9]

% Element-wise division
D = A ./ B;
% D = [0.1111, 0.2500, 0.4286; 0.6667, 1.0000, 1.5000; 2.3333, 4.0000, 9.0000]

% Element-wise exponentiation
E = A .^ B;
% E = [1, 256, 2187; 4096, 3125, 1296; 343, 64, 9]

Array Concatenation

We can concatenate arrays in MATLAB using square brackets []. We can concatenate arrays either horizontally (side-by-side) or vertically (one on top of the other).

Horizontal Concatenation

To concatenate arrays horizontally, we place them side-by-side within square brackets, separated by a space or a comma:

A = [1, 2, 3];
B = [4, 5, 6];

C = [A, B];  % or [A B]
% C = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

Vertical Concatenation

To concatenate arrays vertically, we place them one on top of the other within square brackets, separated by a semicolon:

A = [1, 2, 3];
B = [4, 5, 6];

C = [A; B];
% C = [1, 2, 3;
%      4, 5, 6]

Reshaping Arrays

MATLAB provides the reshape function to change the dimensions of an array without altering its elements. The syntax for the function is as follows:

B = reshape(A, m, n);

Where A is the input array, m and n are the desired number of rows and columns, respectively, and B is the reshaped output array.

For example:

A = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6];
B = reshape(A, 2, 3);
% B = [1, 3, 5;
%      2, 4, 6]

Keep in mind that the product of the new dimensions (i.e., m times n) must be equal to the number of elements in the original array.

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