The simplest way to create a matrix is to define a matrix literal by entering the matrix elements. A matrix literal can contain numeric or character data. A matrix literal can be a single element (called a scalar), a single row of data (called a row vector), a single column of data (called a column vector), or a rectangular array of data (called a matrix). The dimension of a matrix is given by its number of rows and columns. An matrix has n rows and p columns.