Hello!
I'm just doing the Problems of Chapter 1 of Sakurai: Modern Quantum Mechanics. On page 60, problem 2 he writes:
"Suppose a 2x2 matrix X, (not necessary Hermitian, nor unitary) is written as
X = a_0 + \mathbf{\sigma \cdot a} ,
where a_0 and a_{1,2,3} are numbers."
which confuses...