1. The rank of a matrix is the number of pivots in its reduced row echelon form. The nullity is the number of free variables.
2. For any matrix A, its rank plus its nullity equals the number of columns of A.
3. A matrix is invertible if and only if its rank equals the number of columns. Otherwise, the matrix is singular.
1. The rank of a matrix is the number of pivots in its reduced row echelon form. The nullity is the number of free variables.
2. For any matrix A, its rank plus its nullity equals the number of columns of A.
3. A matrix is invertible if and only if its rank equals the number of columns. Otherwise, the matrix is singular.
1. The rank of a matrix is the number of pivots in its reduced row echelon form. The nullity is the number of free variables.
2. For any matrix A, its rank plus its nullity equals the number of columns of A.
3. A matrix is invertible if and only if its rank equals the number of columns. Otherwise, the matrix is singular.
1. The rank of a matrix is the number of pivots in its reduced row echelon form. The nullity is the number of free variables.
2. For any matrix A, its rank plus its nullity equals the number of columns of A.
3. A matrix is invertible if and only if its rank equals the number of columns. Otherwise, the matrix is singular.
Using the three elementary row operations we may rewrite A in an echelon form as
or, continuing with additional row operations, in the reduced row-echelon form
From the above, the homogeneous system has a solution that can be read as
or in vector form as
In the above, recall that w is a free variable while x, y, and z are the three pivot variables. The solution of the homogeneous system (i.e., the null space of A) consists of all scalar multiples of the vector
and, hence, has dimension 1 (the number of free variables).
2. Consider the matrix given by
The associated row reduced echelon form is given by
For the homogeneous system
or, equivalently, we see that are the three pivot variables while are the two free variables.
Here the null space of the given coefficient matrix is
and has dimension 2 (the number of free variables).
Definition Suppose A is an matrix. 1. We call the number of free variables of A x = b the nullity of A and we denote it by . 2. We call the number of pivots of A the rank of A and we denoted it by .
Procedure for computing the rank of a matrix A:
1. Use elementary row operations to transform A to a matrix R in reduced row echelon form. 2. is the number of nonzero rows in R. (Why?) Example
1. For we see that and .
2. The nullity of is 2 while its rank is 3.
Observe that in the above two examples that
+ = (number of columns in the coefficient matrix A). This is no accident as the counts the pivot variables, the counts the free variables, and the number of columns corresponds to the total number of variables for the coefficient matrix A.
Theorem Suppose A is an matrix. Then .
Example Consider the matrix
. The row reduced echelon form of the above is
Since the number of nonzero rows is 3 (that is, there are three pivots), we see that
and that the
.
Problem Is the above matrix B invertible (a.k.a. nonsingular)? So?!!?
Theorem Suppose that A is an matrix. A is an invertible matrix if and only if .
Why?
Problem Find replacements for a, b, c, d so that the matrix
has rank of 1. We now consider the nonhomogenous linear system . We first observe that the solutions to the associated homogenous system form a vector space (called the null space).
Problem Can the same be said for the set of solutions to ?
Fortunately, there is a relationship between the solution sets to and .
Theorem If is a particular solution of (that is, ), then every solution of
can be written as
where represents a solution of .
Proof Let x be any solution of . Then .
Thus, is a solution of , denote this solution by . Then
where is a particular solution of and represents a solution of . >
Example Solve where
and
(Illustrate the above theorem in a particular setting.)
Solution Using the elementary row operations (via technology!) on the augmented matrix we find that
is row equivalent to the reduced row echelon form matrix
.
We see that (with free variables of ). In vector form we may write the
solution to as
The null space for A is given by and .
Definition Suppose that A is an matrix. Then we define the row space of A as
where is the row of A and the column space of A as
where is the column of A.
Theorem If an matrix A is row equivalent to an matrix B, the row space of A is equal to the row space of B.
Note: The above says that the elementary row operations do not change the row space of a matrix. However, the elementary row operations may change the column space.
Example Since
~ ,
the above theorem implies that . In particular,
We note that only three row vectors (and not five!) were required to span . Now, by forming
we find that
and so it follows by the above theorem that
As with , only three (column) vectors are required to span . We observe that
and so .
Problem Explain why in the above example that . (Hint: Consider the rows of zeros in B.)
The last example makes at least one direction of the following theorem plausible.
Theorem The linear system is consistent if and only if . We close this unit by relating the rank of a coefficient matrix to the existence of at least one solution to .
Theorem The linear system is consistent if and only if = .
