LINEAR ALGEBRA- Basis of Various Special Matrices

ku1005

Junior Member
Joined
Oct 27, 2006
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71
Hi guys/girls,

just wondering if I could get some help with the following questions I have encountered, any input is appreciated!!

the question considers upper-triangular matrices(All entries below the diagonal are 0), symmetric matrices(A=A transpose), skew-symmetric matrices( A = (-)A transpose) and diagonal matrices(all entries are 0 except those of the diagonal).

The first question is to state whether each of these special matrices (obviously they are all square) are subspaces of M(n*n) - ie square matrices with real numbers. I believe they all are, since each is closed under addition and multiplication, and each can obviously contain 0 (ie a zero matrix)

Secondly it asks if S(2)- ie the respective two by two matrix, is a subspace of the 2*2 matrices,write down a basis for it. (THIS IS THE PART IM NOT SURE OF)

1) For upper triangular I believe it to be easy, since all upper triangular are in echlon form, the column vectors are thus linearly independent, and also span the subspace, hence I just used the columns from the most basic upper triangular with 1's and 0's for entries as my basis

2)For symmetric, I wrote a symmetric matrix down, and reduced to echelon form, and used againt the columns which are linearly independent, as a basis.

I did the same for the remianing 2, using the same technique. (BUT I DONT THISNK ITS CORRECT FOR IT SEEMS TO SIMPLE)

The final quesiton is, given S(n) is a subspace for each of the listed matrices, what is the dimension of each

From my technique above, i will simply get that the Dim = n for each type.

I think this is far to simple and thus I know something im doing isnt correct, could someone please shed some light as to where my miunderstanding is!

Thanks heaps!
 
answered it guys,I wasnt thinking of the matrices as actual subspace, but rather splitting them into vecotrs, which isnt necessary, so it makes it easier to solve. Thanks anyways
 
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