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Animation of Gaussian elimination. Red row eliminates the following rows, green rows change their order. In mathematics, Gaussian elimination, also known as row reduction, is an algorithm for solving systems of linear equations. It consists of a sequence of row-wise operations performed on the corresponding matrix of coefficients.
The reduced row echelon form of a matrix is unique and does not depend on the sequence of elementary row operations used to obtain it. The variant of Gaussian elimination that transforms a matrix to reduced row echelon form is sometimes called Gauss–Jordan elimination. A matrix is in column echelon form if its transpose is in row echelon form.
Before Gauss many mathematicians in Eurasia were performing and perfecting it yet as the method became relegated to school grade, few of them left any detailed descriptions. Thus the name Gaussian elimination is only a convenient abbreviation of a complex history. The Polish astronomer Tadeusz Banachiewicz introduced the LU decomposition in ...
A row can be replaced by the sum of that row and a multiple of another row. R i + k R j → R i , where i ≠ j {\displaystyle R_{i}+kR_{j}\rightarrow R_{i},{\mbox{where }}i\neq j} If E is an elementary matrix, as described below, to apply the elementary row operation to a matrix A , one multiplies A by the elementary matrix on the left, EA .
In the case of matrices, the process involves manipulating either the rows or the columns of the matrix and so is usually referred to as row-reduction or column-reduction, respectively. Often the aim of reduction is to transform a matrix into its "row-reduced echelon form" or "row-echelon form"; this is the goal of Gaussian elimination.
A pivot position in a matrix, A, is a position in the matrix that corresponds to a row–leading 1 in the reduced row echelon form of A. Since the reduced row echelon form of A is unique, the pivot positions are uniquely determined and do not depend on whether or not row interchanges are performed in the reduction process. Also, the pivot of a ...
Gaussian elimination is a useful and easy way to compute the inverse of a matrix. To compute a matrix inverse using this method, an augmented matrix is first created with the left side being the matrix to invert and the right side being the identity matrix .
The Gaussian elimination is a similar algorithm; it transforms any matrix to row echelon form. [51] Both methods proceed by multiplying the matrix by suitable elementary matrices, which correspond to permuting rows or columns and adding multiples of one row to another row.