The rational canonical form via the splitting field

Abstract

It is clear that a given rational canonical form can be further resolved to a Jordan canonical form with entries from the splitting field of its minimal polynomial. Conversely, with an a priori knowledge of the existence and uniqueness of the rational canonical form of a matrix with entries from a general field, one can modify its Jordan canonical form in the splitting field of its minimal polynomial to construct its rational canonical form in the original field. No author has tried this converse with the a priori existence–uniqueness condition removed. It is feared that “in many occasions when, after a result has been established for a matrix with entries in a given field, considered as a matrix with entries in a finite extension of that field, we cannot go back from the extension field to get the desired information in the original field” [I.N. Herstein, Topics in Algebra, Ginn and Company, Waltham, MA, 1964 (pp. 262–263)]. The present paper removes this a priori condition and uses a “symmetrization” to “integrate” back the Jordan canonical form of a matrix to its rational canonical form in the original field.