Book excerpt: This book deals with the mathematical properties of dimensioned quantities, such as length, mass, voltage, and viscosity. Beginning with a careful examination of how one expresses the numerical results of a measurement and uses these results in subsequent manipulations, the author rigorously constructs the notion of dimensioned numbers and discusses their algebraic structure. The result is a unification of linear algebra and traditional dimensional analysis that can be extended from the scalars to which the traditional analysis is perforce restricted to multidimensional vectors of the sort frequently encountered in engineering, systems theory, economics, and other applications.