A Note on Matrix Inversion

Author(s): A. Polter Geist

Source: Mathematics Magazine, Vol. 46, No. 4 (Sep., 1973), p. 226
Published by: Mathematical Association of America
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2688313
Accessed: 20-09-2016 00:50 UTC

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 A NOTE ON MATRIX INVERSION

A. POLTER GEIST, Miskatonic University, Arkham, Mass.

In discussing certain stochastic processes, it is useful to know the inverse of the

n-by-n matrix S whose entries on the main diagonal are 0, and all of whose other
entries are 1. The following method may be of interest.
Let U be the n-by-n matrix all of whose entries are 1. Then, S = U - I. Thus,

S-1 = (I- U)-1 = I + U + U2 + U3 +

It is easily seen that U2 = nU, U3 = n2U, etc., so that we have

-S-' = I+U+nU+n2U+ **

= I+U(1+n+n2+n 2

= 1+ U--
1-n'

and we obtain the desired inverse

S-I U-I.
n-1

It is clear that this fails when n = 1.

NOTES AND COMMENTS

Joseph S. Madachy writes regarding Michael Deakin's Walking in the rain in the
November 1972 issue that a similar article A walk in the rain by Alan Sutcliffe
appeared in the February 1962 issue of Recreational Mathematics Magazine.

Andrzej Makowski notes that inequalities (f), (g), (h), (k), (1), (m), and (n) of th
paper An approach to trigonometric inequalities by Harold Ehret (this MAGAZINE,
43 (1970) 254-257) were also obtained from the Erd6s inequality by J. M. Child in
his paper Inequalities connected with a triangle (Math. Gazette, 23 (1939) 138-143;
see especially p. 142).

From Roberto Frucht regarding The distribution of quadratic residues in fields

of order p2 by Bergum and Jordan in the September 1972 issue: "It seems that the
authors were not aware of the paper by Reinaldo E. Giudici Quadratic residues in
GF (p2), this MAGAZINE, 43 (1971) 153-157. Indeed the authors study in their paper
only the special case where p is a prime of the form 8k + 5; Giudici however had
already considered in his paper the general case of odd primes without any restriction.
As a consequence most of the results obtained by Bergum and Jordan can be read
off immediately from Giudici's paper by letting p -5 (mod 8) and g = -2. Compare
for instance Bergum-Jordan's Theorem 4.1 with Giudici's Theorem 5."

226

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