On the ranks of skew-centrosymmetric matrices over finite fields (Q2564939)

A matrix \(A\) over a field \(F\) is called centrosymmetric if it is symmetric with respect to its main and secondary diagonals, and \(A\) is called skew-entrosymmetric if it is symmetric with respect to its secondary diagonal and skew symmetric with respect to its main diagonal. If \(F\) has characteristic two and \(A\) is skew-centrosymmetric then it is assumed that all diagonal entries of \(A\) are 0. For each \(n\in\mathbb{N}\), the authors consider special \(n+1\) by \(n+1\) skew-centrosymmetric matrices built up in the following way: \[ A_n=\left[\begin{matrix} a_0 & a_1 &\cdots & a_n\\ -a_1 & a_0 && a_{n-1}\\ -a_2 & -a_1 && a_{n-2}\\ -a_n & -a_{n-1} && a_0\end{matrix}\right] \] where \(a_0,a_1,\dots,a_n\in F\) with \(a_0=0\). Let \(v=\{v_0,v_1,\dots:n\in\mathbb{N}_0\}\) be the sequence of nullities \(v_n=\text{null}(A_n)\). This sequence is unimodal in the sense that there is a sequence of positive integers \(m_i\) such that \(v\) is the concatenation of strings of the form \(1,2,\dots,m_i-1\), \(m_i,m_{i-1},\dots,2, 1, 0\). On the other hand, every unimodal sequence of nonnegative integers is a nullity sequence for some sequence of matrices \(\{A_n\}\). This result allows to determine the number of invertible skew-centrosymmetric \(n+1\) by \(n+1\) matrices over a finite field \(F\) with \(q=p^r\) elements: There are \(q^{n-1(q-1)}\) such matrices over \(F\) where \(n\) is an odd positive integer. Moreover, there are \((q-1)(q^{n-s}+q^{n-s-1})\) skew-centrosymmetric \(n+1\) by \(n+1\) matrices over \(F\) with nullity \(s\). Now let \(F\) be a finite field of characteristic two, \(|F|=q=2^m\), let \(n\in\mathbb{N}\) be odd, and let \(a_0,a_1,\dots,a_n\in F\) with corresponding skew-centrosymmetric matrix \(A_n\). Then there are \((q-1)q^n\) invertible skew-centrosymmetric matrices over \(F\).