Linear preservers of extremes of rank inequalities over semirings: Row and column ranks (Q819149)

There are different ways to define a rank of a matrix with entries from a \textit{semiring} (a ring without the minus sign; in the present review, a semiring is \textit{unital}, without zero divisors, and \textit{antinegative}, i.e. \(a+b=0\) implies \(a=0=b\)). The authors are in particular interested in a \textit{column rank}, \(c(A)\), and, when the semiring is contained in non-negative real numbers, also in the `classical' matrix rank \(\rho(A)\). Here, \(c(A)\) is the dimension of the linear span of columns of \(A\) over a semiring \({\mathcal S}\); in general we have \(\rho(A)\leq c(A)\). They start by listing some sharp inequalities involving \(c(A)\) and \(\rho(A)\). Then, they consider the extremal case when inequality turns into equality, and study surjective linear preservers of such matrix tuples. As a sample result, the inequality \(c(AB)\leq c(B)\) always holds for \(n\)-by-\(n\) matrices over semiring \({\mathcal S}\). In the extremal case, suppose a linear surjection \(\Phi:M_{n}({\mathcal S})\to M_{n}({\mathcal S})\) satisfies \(c(AB)=c(B)\Rightarrow c(\Phi(A)\Phi(B))=c(\Phi(B))\). If \(n\geq 4\) then \(\Phi(X)=P(X\circ B)P^t\) where \(P\) is a permutation matrix, and where matrix \(B\) is of column rank one, with its entries being units from the center of \(\mathcal S\). Here, \(X\circ B\) denotes the entrywise product of two matrices. For some of the listed inequalities, transposition is also possible, depending on the arithmetic in a semiring. The proofs are a reduction to linear `line preservers,' i.e. to linear surjections that map each row/column of a matrix to a row or a column. Over \(\mathcal S\) (=unital antinegative semiring without zero divisors), such surjections come in two forms: \(X\mapsto P(X\circ B)Q\) or \(X\mapsto P(X\circ B)^tQ\) for some permutation matrices \(P,Q\) and some matrix \(B\), whose entries are units from the center.