Jordan Canonical Form (JCF) is one of the most important, and useful, concepts in linear algebra. In this book we develop JCF and show how to apply it to solving systems of differential equations. We first develop JCF, including the concepts involved in it eigenvalues, eigenvectors, and chains of generalized eigenvectors. We begin with the diagonalizable case and then proceed to the general case, but we do not present a complete proof. Indeed, our interest here is not in JCF per se, but in one of its important applications. We devote the bulk of our attention in this book to showing how to...

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...