Today I would like to mention a low-level peculiarity I was taught in highschool, but passed over during my studies. Why it differs whetter matrix is traversed by rows or columns? # Even though we think of a matrices as a two dimensional creatures, inside a computer they have to be stored as a sequence of numbers. Therefore there are two schemas one can follow, row-first and column-first. Historically they are called C-style and Fortran-style respectively.