In this chapter we elaborate upon the investigations into similarity which were begun in
Chapter 5 and bring our understanding of the matter to a satisfactory and elegant conclusion
in the presentation of the “Jordan1
canonical form.” This term refers to a special form that
a matrix may be transformed into under similarity.
We saw in Chapter 5 that the similarity transformation of a matrix into a special form
is of interest from the point of view of applications and that problems of transforming a
matrix under similarity are quite interesting in themselves. The diagonalization of symmetric
matrices was applied to quadratic forms in Section 5.6 and to the inertia tensor in Section
5.7. We will see in Section 6.3 that the Jordan canonical form is of use in solving systems of
differential equations