# Math Help - Challange question-vectoer spaces

1. ## Challange question-vectoer spaces

My lecture put the following challenge question up:

2. I don't know about others, but it is too small for me to read. Try typing it out in LaTex.

3. Originally Posted by galactus
I don't know about others, but it is too small for me to read. Try typing it out in LaTex.
The question is :

A matrix A is said to be anti-symmetric if $A^T = - A$ . Show that

$H = [ A \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times n} | A ~is~ anti-summetric ~]$

determine its dimension .

4. The first part is easy. You must show that if A and B are anti-symmetric matrices and r is a number, A+ B and rA are also anti-symmetric. And that follows from the definitions of matrix addition and multiplication of a matrix by a number.

As for the dimension, the space of all n by n matrices has dimension $n^2$ because you can choose any of the $n^2$ entries arbitrarily. For anti-symmetric matrices, you know that numbers on the diagonal must be 0. How many numbers are there on the diagonal? How many other numbers does that leave? And once you have chosen the numbers above the diagonal, the numbers below must be their negatives. How many numbers are there above the diagonal?