Jordan Canonical Form: Theory and Practice

Jordan Canonical Form (JCF) is one of the most important, and useful, concepts in linear algebra. The JCF of a linear transformation, or of a matrix, encodes all of the structural information about that linear transformation, or matrix. This book is a careful development of JCF. After beginning with background material, we introduce Jordan Canonical Form and related notions: eigenvalues, (generalized) eigenvectors, and the characteristic and minimum polynomials. We decide the question of diagonalizability, and prove the Cayley-Hamilton theorem. Then we present a careful and complete proof of t