markus
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So, for a school project I'm trying to find the eigenvalues of a matrix to see if it is diagonalizable. Our teacher said we should use the function eigenvects.
B:= Matrix(5, 5, {(1, 1) = -9, (1, 2) = 11, (1, 3) = -21, (1, 4) = 63, (1, 5) = -252, (2, 1) = 70, (2, 2) = -69, (2, 3) = 141, (2, 4) = -421, (2, 5) = 1684, (3, 1) = -575, (3, 2) = 575, (3, 3) = -1149, (3, 4) = 3451, (3, 5) = -13801, (4, 1) = 3891, (4, 2) = -3891, (4, 3) = 7782, (4, 4) = -23345, (4, 5) = 93365, (5, 1) = 1024, (5, 2) = -1024, (5, 3) = 2048, (5, 4) = -6144, (5, 5) = 24572});
eigenvects(B);
the result I get is [0, 5, {[0 21/256 -71/128 973/256 1]}]
There are a couple of things I don't understand:
Maple says 0 is an eigenvalue with algebraic multiplicity 5, right? But where are the 5 eigenvectors? [0 21/256 -71/128 973/256 1] is only one. Shouldn't a 5*5 diagonalized matrix have 5 eigenvectors? Using other functions like Eigenvectors(B) gives similarly confusing results. Then they put in the eigenvector in one column and then fills the other with zeroes. Why does it do that? Isn't the definition of an eigenvector that it shouldn't be 0?
Thanks in advance.