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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
The results in this paper respond to two rather natural questions about a polar decomposition A = UP, where U is a unitary matrix and P is positive semidefinite. Let λ1, …, λn be the eigenvalues of A. The questions are:
(A) When will |λ1|, …, |λn| be the eigenvalues of P?
(B) When will λ1/|λ1|, …, λn/|λn| be the eigenvalues of U?
The complete answer to (A) is “if and only if U and P commute.” In an important special case the answer to (B) is “if and only if U2 and P commute.“
Since these matters are best couched in terms of two different inertias, we begin with a unifying definition of inertia which views all inertias from a single perspective.
For each square complex matrix A and each complex number z let m(A, z) denote the multiplicity of z as a root of the characteristic polynomial