MA 106 Handout-1

Tutor : Abhinav Rastogi January 17, 2014

Topics covered
Interpretations of matrix product Special matrices like symmetric, skew-symmetric, nilpotent, hermitian, skew-hermitian, orthogonal, unitary, upper-triangular, strictly upper-triangular The three types of elementary row operations and their matrix representation Row echelon and row canonical form Gauss elimination method for solving a linear system

Some points to ponder

Can there be a 2 2 nilpotent matrix with exactly (i)two, (ii)three and (iii)four non-zero enteries? Is it necessary for A and B to commute if A, B and A + B are nilpotent? If AB and BA are dened, is it necessary for A and B to be square matrices? If no, are AB and BA necessarily square matrices? Is T r(AB ) = T r(BA)? Is the row echelon form of a matrix unique? What about the row canonical form? When can two elementary operations be applied in the same step? Why do we stick to row operations while solving a linear system? Why not column operations?

Some problems
1. If A is invertible, show that (AT )1 = (A1 )T . 2. Show that a strictly upper triangular matrix is nilpotent. 3. Let D be a diagonal matrix with distinct diagonal enteries. Show that if a matrix M commutes with D, then M must be diagonal. 4. Prove that if A is a symmetric matrix and B is a skew symmetric matrix then T r(AB ) = 0. What can you say about T r(AB ) if A is hermitian and B is skew Hermitian? 5. If A, B and C are matrices of sizes such that AB and (AB )C are dened then show that BC and A(BC ) are also dened and (AB )C = A(BC ). As a conse- quence of this result, we may write ABC without any ambiguity. T T 6. Prove that (A1 A2 A3 ..An )T = AT n ..A2 A1 . 7. If a hermitian matrix A and a skew hermitian matrix B commute, show that AB is skew-hermitian. 1 1 8. If M = , nd M n n N. 0 1 9. Let A Rmn . If T r(AT A) = 0, what can you say about A?