Page 40 - A Guide to MATLAB for Beginners and Experienced Users

Vectors and Matrices 21

Vectors
A vector is an ordered list of numbers. You can enter a vector of any lengthin
MATLAB by typing a list of numbers, separated by commas or spaces, inside
square brackets. For example,

>> Z = [2,4,6,8]

Z=
2 4 6 8

>>Y=[4-35-281]

Y=
4 -3 5 -2 8 1

Suppose you want to create a vector of values running from 1 to 9. Here’s
how to do it without typing each number:

>> X = 1:9

X=
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

The notation 1:9 is used to represent a vector of numbers running from 1 to
9 in increments of 1. The increment can be specified as the second of three
arguments:

>> X = 0:2:10

X=
0 2 4 6 8 10

You can also use fractional or negative increments, for example, 0:0.1:1 or
100:-1:0.
The elements of the vector X can be extracted as X(1), X(2), etc. For ex-
ample,

>> X(3)

ans =
4