Ivan Shishkin, Rye (1878)

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Determinant of a gcd matrix

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Solution

Solution by Ancient Tree · EN

After testing the first cases, one is led to conjecture the formula :
det⁡(An)=∏i=1nφ(i)\operatorname{det}\left(A_n\right)=\prod_{i=1}^n \varphi(i)where φ\varphi 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 m≥1m\geq 1, we have that :
m=∑d∣mφ(d)m=\sum_{d | m} \varphi(d)Applying this to the gcd, we obtain :
gcd⁡(i,j)=∑d∣gcd⁡(i,j)φ(d)=∑d∣i and d∣jφ(d)\operatorname{gcd}(i, j)=\sum_{d \mid \operatorname{gcd}(i, j)} \varphi(d)=\sum_{d \mid i \text { and }d|j} \varphi(d)This can be rewritten as a sum over all 1≤d≤n1\leq d\leq n by introducing the symbols δd∣i\delta_{d|i}, which are 1 if d∣id|i and 0 if not :
gcd⁡(i,j)=∑d=1nδd∣iφ(d)δd∣j\operatorname{gcd}(i, j)=\sum_{d=1}^{n} \delta_{d \mid i} \varphi(d) \delta_{d \mid j}But this is reminiscent of the formula for the coefficient of a matrix of the form LDUL D U where DD is diagonal. More precisely here, we have :
gcd⁡(i,j)=(Ldiag⁡(φ(1),…,φ(n))L⊤)ij\operatorname{gcd}(i, j)=\left(L \operatorname{diag}(\varphi(1), \ldots, \varphi(n)) L^{\top}\right)_{ij}where
LL is the upper triangular matrix with coefficients Lij=δj∣iL_{ij}=\delta_{j|i}. So the determinant of our matrix is given by :
det⁡(An)=∏i=1nφ(i)⋅det⁡(L)2\operatorname{det}\left(A_n\right)=\prod_{i=1}^n \varphi(i) \cdot \operatorname{det}(L)^2But it is straightforward to see that LL 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 AnA_{n} written above is called the LULU decomposition, where LL stands for "lower triangular" and UU for "upper triangular". It is really useful to compute some determinants and its unicity can lead to some beautiful formulas.

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