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Matrix variable row reduce?

Posted 9 years ago

Does anyone know how to have Mathematica recognize a matrix with a variable and have it in RREF?

Please and thank you!

--Anthony S.

POSTED BY: Anthony S.
2 Replies

As long as we're talking about RowReduce I would like to mention a deficiency. It would be very nice if the row reduction, or perhaps more correctly the pivot elements, could be confined to a contiguous block of elements in the matrix. The pivot operations would be confined to that block but, of course, all elements in the rows would be affected.

The reason for this is that then one could, say, append a unit matrix to the right of a matrix to be reduced. Then the reduction would produce the inverse matrix on the right. But if the left hand matrix is not full row rank then the reduction extends into the right hand matrix, which generally we wouldn't want to do. Also, by limiting the pivot block we could do more selective reductions of the matrix, say even pivot on a single element.

In my Presentations application I have a Student's Linear Equations section which labels matrices with row and column names for context and which allows detailed step by step operations. But I have to use my own row reduction and I would much prefer to use the Wolfram routine.

Posted 9 years ago

Perhaps RowReduce

POSTED BY: Bill Simpson
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