Reducing subspace

Short description: Concept in linear algebra

In linear algebra, a reducing subspace $W$ of a linear map $T:V\to V$ from a Hilbert space $V$ to itself is an invariant subspace of $T$ whose orthogonal complement $W^{\perp }$ is also an invariant subspace of $T.$ That is, $T(W)\subseteq W$ and $T(W^{\perp })\subseteq W^{\perp }.$ One says that the subspace $W$ reduces the map $T.$

One says that a linear map is reducible if it has a nontrivial reducing subspace. Otherwise one says it is irreducible.

If $V$ is of finite dimension $r$ and $W$ is a reducing subspace of the map $T:V\to V$ represented under basis $B$ by matrix $M\in {\mathbb{ℝ}}^{r\times r}$ then $M$ can be expressed as the sum

$$M=P_{W}M{P}_W+P_{W^{\perp }}M{P}_{W^{\perp }}$$

where $P_W\in {\mathbb{ℝ}}^{r\times r}$ is the matrix of the orthogonal projection from $V$ to $W$ and $P_{W^{\perp }}=I-P_W$ is the matrix of the projection onto $W^{\perp }.$ (Here $I\in {\mathbb{ℝ}}^{r\times r}$ is the identity matrix.)

Furthermore, $V$ has an orthonormal basis $B^{\prime }$ with a subset that is an orthonormal basis of $W$. If $Q\in {\mathbb{ℝ}}^{r\times r}$ is the transition matrix from $B$ to $B^{\prime }$ then with respect to $B^{\prime }$ the matrix $Q^{-1}MQ$ representing $T$ is a block-diagonal matrix

$$Q^{-1}MQ=\left[\begin{array}{cc}A& 0\\ 0& B\end{array}\right]$$

with $A\in {\mathbb{ℝ}}^{d\times d},$ where $d=\dim W$, and $B\in {\mathbb{ℝ}}^{(r-d)\times (r-d)}.$