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vsage
Oct8-04, 10:14 AM
Are there two matrices A and B such that A*B is the zero matrix but B*A is not?

I'm leaning toward no.. I'm composing my solution right now.

Bah the only thing I can come up with is that if any row of A can be treated as a vector and any column of row B can be treated as a vector, for element (i, j) in the matrix AB will be 0 iff the vector of row i in A and column j in B are orthogonal (dot product is 0). I can't get much further right now :(

TenaliRaman
Oct8-04, 11:13 AM
A=

\left\{
\begin{array}{ccc}
1 & 1 \\
0 & 0
\end{array}
\right\}


B=

\left\{
\begin{array}{ccc}
1 & 1 \\
-1 & -1
\end{array}
\right\}


-- AI

vsage
Oct8-04, 02:33 PM
A=

\left\{
\begin{array}{ccc}
1 & 1 \\
0 & 0
\end{array}
\right\}


B=

\left\{
\begin{array}{ccc}
1 & 1 \\
-1 & -1
\end{array}
\right\}


-- AI

Thanks. Although the question did just originally ask what is an example after many hours of scratching my head I made a proof that would satisfy that. Thank you for a template to go by though it facilitated the process a little.