It’s not that I’m expecting Chinese to be commutative, but the original image makes it look as such, with the upper and lower triangles of the matrix having the same symbols. In your 2D example this would be like having ab on the top right as well (I would give an example of the characters, but I cannot write Chinese).
Why would it be? Language rarely is.
Because the matrix in the original post is symmetric.
A*B is not B*A in every calculus. Imagine what if the entries where matrices themselves.
Let me show you in 2 D instead of 5:
(a,b)^T*(a,b) = {(a * a, b * a),(ab, bb)}
Where () are row vectors, power of T is transposition and {()} is a matrix.
It’s not that I’m expecting Chinese to be commutative, but the original image makes it look as such, with the upper and lower triangles of the matrix having the same symbols. In your 2D example this would be like having ab on the top right as well (I would give an example of the characters, but I cannot write Chinese).
Fuck, you are right.
Context? Torsion? Shitty OCR?
I think Imperial Chinese Geometry considers it one of the great open questions.