Period 6 element between barium and hafnium, and radium and rutherfordium, respectively. This convention is entirely a matter of aesthetics and formatting practicality; a rarely used wide-formatted periodic table inserts the lanthanide and actinide series in their proper places, as parts of the table's sixth and seventh rows (periods). Lanthanum is a chemical element with the symbol La and atomic number 57. It is the first element in the lanthanide series. It is a soft, ductile, silvery-white metal that tarnishes rapidly when exposed to air and is soft enough to be cut with a knife. It is the eponym of the lanthanide series,
Chemical equation a 2 before O, giving the balanced equation: This equation does not have any coefficients in front of CH and CO, since a coefficient of 1 is dropped. Generally, any chemical equation involving "J" different molecules can be written as: where "R" is the symbol for the "j-th" molecule, and ν is the stoichiometric coefficient for the "j-th" molecule, positive for products, negative for reactants (or vice versa). A properly balanced chemical equation will then obey: where the composition matrix "a" is the number of atoms of element "i" in molecule "j". Any vector which, when operated upon by the