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Jordan Normal Form / Jordan basis

  • 05-05-2011 1:28pm
    #1
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 927 ✭✭✭


    Determine the Jordan Normal form and find some Jordan basis of the matrix
    3 -3 1
    A = 2 -2 1
    2 -3 2

    My problem here is that my lecturer seems to be doing completely different things with every question and it's getting confusing.

    So, I calculated the characteristic polynomial of the matrix, and got one
    eigenvalue of t = 1.

    So I'm now dealing with the matrix A - tI, in this case A - I.

    rk(A - I) = 1, so dimKer(A - I) = 2.

    (A - I)^2 = 0 = B

    So rk(B) = 0, then dimKer(B) = 3

    Continually raising the powers of A - I will results in 0, so the kernels of powers stabilize at the second step, so we should expect a thread of length 2.

    The kernel of A - I is spanned by the vectors ( 3/2, 1, 0) and (-1/2, 0, 1)
    I should be using columns instead of rows, but this was the easiest way to write it. Just imagine they were written as columns..


    Here's the main issue, when I find out what vectors span the kernel, and use those as columns of a new matrix, I then reduce that matrix to Reduced Column Echelon Form.

    That's fine, but, in some of my lecturers examples he takes a vector corresponding to the missing leading one as a basis, and it others he takes one of the columns of the RCEF.

    My question: why the differences and does it matter which of the columns are taken?


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