Making Lists of Objects
In doing calculations, it is often convenient to collect together several objects, and treat them as a single entity.
Lists give you a way to make collections of objects in
Mathematica. As you will see later, lists are very important and general structures in
Mathematica.
A list such as
is a collection of three objects. But in many ways, you can treat the whole list as a single object. You can, for example, do arithmetic on the whole list at once, or assign the whole list to be the value of a variable.
Here is a list of three numbers.
| Out[1]= |  |
This squares each number in the list, and adds
to it.
| Out[2]= |  |
This takes differences between corresponding elements in the two lists. The lists must be the same length.
| Out[3]= |  |
The value of
is the whole list.
| Out[4]= |  |
| Out[5]= |  |
Just as you can set variables to be numbers, so also you can set them to be lists.
This assigns
to be a list.
| Out[6]= |  |
Wherever
appears, it is replaced by the list.
| Out[7]= |  |
