when normalizing the first column of a matrix its simple just the square root of the sum of the elements of the column squared correct?
It's correct assuming you want the Euclidean norm of the column set to 1. But there are other norms, so it really depends on what you're doing,e.g.
>> v=[1 2 3];
>> v/norm(v)
ans =
0.2673 0.5345 0.8018
>> v/norm(v,1)
ans =
0.1667 0.3333 0.5000
>> v/norm(v,inf)
ans =
0.3333 0.6667 1.0000
