Archive of posts on Apr 13, 2020

• Apr 13, 2020

  Algebraic structure of chemicals

  Regarding balancing chemical equations, actually we are trying to find a non-trivial linear combination of some chemicals to get zero. The interesting thing is that the coefficients can only be integers ($\mathbb Z$), which is not a field, so the algebraic structure of chemicals is not linear space. They actually live in a free $\mathbb Z$-module. See how I formalize this idea in mathematical language.

  • Categories: chemistry
  • Tags: linear algebra, abstract algebra