Skip to main content
edited tags
Link
user26857
user26857
Post Closed as "exact duplicate" by CommunityBot, Aang, Davide Giraudo, Seirios, Dennis Gulko
Tweeted twitter.com/#!/StackMath/status/310292247298072577

Prove that if matrix A$A$ is nilpotent, then I+A$I+A$ is invertible.

Source Link
J Park
  • 117
  • 1
  • 2

Prove that if matrix A is nilpotent, then I+A is invertible.

So my friend and I are working on this and here is what we have so far.

We want to show that $\exists \, B$ s.t. $(I+A)B = I$. We considered the fact that $I - A^k = I$ for some positive $k$. Now, if $B = (I-A+A^2-A^3+ \cdots -A^{k-1})$, then $(I+A)B = I-A^k = I$. My question is: in matrix $B$, why is the sign for $A^{k-1}$ negative? Couldn't it be positive, in which case we'd get $(I+A)B = I + A^k$?

Thank you.