Many of you are either currently taken Chemistry, or you have taken it in the past. One of the fundamental tasks in any Chemistry class is to balance a chemical equation. Using a combination of guess-and-check and luck, your job is to find out how many kids it takes to get that chubby boy off the ground on that chemical see-saw. What if there was a way to get rid of the guessing game and replace it with something a bit more systematic? Like an augmented matrix?

Balancing Chemical Reactions

In a sneak preview of the fact that much of your college life will be devoted to deciphering your professor's cosmopolitan accent, here is a video by a University of Buffalo on applying Linear Algebra, the mathematics of matrices, to the problem of balancing chemical equations. Sounds useful. Duration_11_27