[yoda222]

Not a mathematician, just an engineer that used matrix a lot (and even worked for MathWorks at one point), I would say that most mathematicians don't care. Matrix is 2D, they don't have a good way to be laid out in 1D (which is what is done here, by giving them linear indices). They should not be represented in 1D.

The only type of mathematicians that actually care are: - the one that use software where using one or the other and the "incorrect" algorithm may impact the performance significantly. Or worse, the one that would use software that don't use the same arbitrary choice (column major vs row major). And when I say that they care, it's probably a pain for them to think about it. - the one that write these kind of software (they may describe themselves as software engineer, but some may still call themselves mathematicians, applied mathematicians, or other things like that).

Now maybe what the author wanted to say is that some language "favored by mathematician" (Fortran, MATLAB, Julia, R) are column major, while language "favored by computer scientist" (C, C++) are row major

[pklausler]

Languages that don't have multidimensional arrays tend to have "arrays of arrays" instead, and that naturally leads to a layout where the last subscript varies fastest. Languages that do have multidimensional arrays can of course lay them out in any order.

[jesuslop]

ah, so you can get row vectors with a type cast in C but not column ones. While in Fortran and friends is the converse (if they casted). Yep that is more mathy. Linear map evaluation is linear combination of columns.

EDIT: type cast or just single square bracket application in C