User:IssaRice/Linear algebra/Riesz representation theorem
Let's take the case where and the inner product is the usual dot product. What does the Riesz representation theorem say in this case? It says that if we have a linear functional then we can write as for some vector . But we already know (from the correspondence between matrices and linear transformations) that we can represent as a 1-by-n matrix. And v can be thought of as a n-by-1 matrix. And now the dot product is the same thing as the matrix multiplication!
If is the standard basis of and is the standard basis of , then .