# Matrix notation in Sutton and Barto

On pg. 206 of Barto and Sutton's Reinforcement Learning, there is a curious statement about the result of a scalar product:

As I interpret it, A is the expectation of a scalar product of two d-dimensional vectors: which should be a scalar, right? So how do they get a dxd-matrix from it? Is it a shorthand for a scalar matrix (diagonal with the repeated coefficient, namely this scalar product)?

$$\mathbf{a}\mathbf{b}^T$$
where $$\mathbf{a}$$ and $$\mathbf{b}$$ are $$d$$ dimensional vectors, it does not calculate the scalar product. Instead it treats both vectors as matrices and calculates a matrix product, which will be a $$d \times d$$ matrix because you are multiplying a $$d \times 1$$ matrix by a $$1 \times d$$ matrix.
Worthing noting that the scalar product can also be calculated as a $$1 \times 1$$ matrix if follow the same matrix multiplication rules but with the first vector transposed instead:
$$\mathbf{a}^T\mathbf{b}$$
which leads to multiplying a $$1 \times d$$ matrix by a $$d \times 1$$ matrix. This is why the value function approximation can be written as $$\mathbf{w}^T\mathbf{x}_t$$ (there is a small liberty taken of assuming a $$1 \times 1$$ matrix is the same as a scalar value in terms of notation).