What is the determinant of the matrix of size with coefficients ?
Solutions
1Hint 1
Open this only if you want a small nudge before looking at the solutions.
Hint 2
Open this only if you want a small nudge before looking at the solutions.
Reveal solutionsAre you sure? Give it a try first.
After testing the first cases, one is led to conjecture the formula :
where is Euler's totient function.
One first trick to make this function appear in the coefficients of the matrix is to remember that, for any integer , we have that :
Applying this to the gcd, we obtain :
This can be rewritten as a sum over all by introducing the symbols , which are 1 if and 0 if not :
But this is reminiscent of the formula for the coefficient of a matrix of the form where is diagonal. More precisely here, we have :
where
is the upper triangular matrix with coefficients . So the determinant of our matrix is given by :
But it is straightforward to see that is a triangular matrix with 1s on the diagonal, so its determinant is 1. We have arrived at the wanted result.
NB: The decomposition of our matrix written above is called the decomposition, where stands for "lower triangular" and for "upper triangular". It is really useful to compute some determinants and its unicity can lead to some beautiful formulas.
