Simultaneous reduction to triangular and companion forms of pairs of matrices: The case \(rank(I-AZ)=1\) (Q2644729)

In 1896, Frobenius investigated the simultaneous reduction of two \(m\times m\) (complex) matrices A and Z to upper triangular forms. Recently, a simultaneous reduction of A and Z to complementary triangular forms has received attention. The motivation for this type of reduction comes from theory. But for such a type of reduction no comprehensive theory is yet available. In several publications on this subject, attention is paid to cases where \(rank(A-Z)=1\), the ``additive'' rank one condition. In the present paper the authors focus on the ``multiplicative'' version \(rank(I-AZ)=1\) of the rank one condition and investigate: (i) the simultaneous reduction to complementary triangular forms of two matrices A and Z, resp. for a first companion matrix A and a third companion matrix Z; (ii) the simultaneous reduction to upper triangular forms of a first companion matrix A and a third companion matrix Z resp. the simultaneous reduction of two matrices A and Z to a first and a third companion matrix. The above results are multiplicative analogues of the corresponding known results concerning the additive rank one case. As the authors mention, analogous results for second and fourth companion matrices (instead of first and third) can be obtained taking transposes. In this paper, an \(m\times m\) (complex) matrix \(A=(a_{ij})\) is called a first (resp. third) companion matrix if \(a_{i,i+1}=1\), \(a_{mj}=a_{j-1}\), \(i=1,...,m-1\), \(j=1,...,m\) (resp. \(a_{i,i-1}=1\), \(a_{1j}=a_{m-j}\), \(i=2,...,m\), \(j=1,...,m)\) and \(a_{ij}=0\) otherwise. A matrix A is a second (resp. fourth) companion matrix if the transpose of A is a first (resp. third) companion matrix.