A short proof of Botha's theorem on products of idempotent linear mappings (Q1938708)

Let \(V\) be a vector space of finite dimension \(n\) over a field \(K\). For a linear mapping \(\pi : V \rightarrow V\) let \(\nu(\pi):= \dim \ker \pi\) denote the nullity and \(\mathrm{B}(\pi) := V(\pi-1_V)\) the path (residual space) of \(\pi\). Also let \(\mathrm{F}(\pi) := \ker(\pi - 1_V)\). By economical manipulations of these concepts the authors give a short inductive proof of \textit{J. D. Botha}'s theorem [Linear Multilinear Algebra 40, No. 4, 365--371 (1996; Zbl 0866.15005)]: If \(\pi\) is a linear transformation, \(k\in\mathbb{N}\), and \(\nu_1, \ldots, \nu_k \in\mathbb{N}_0\) such that \(\nu_i\leq\nu(\pi)\) and \(\dim \mathrm{B}(\pi) \leq \nu_1 + \cdots + \nu_k\), then \(\pi=\rho_1\cdots\rho_k\) for idempotents \(\rho_i\) such that \(\nu(\rho_i)= \nu_i\).