Matrix echelon forms: Difference between revisions

'''[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermite_normal_form Hermite Normal Form]''', or '''HNF''': this one's constraints begin with echelon form and integer, therefore every HNF is also IREF. But HNF is not exactly reduced (as discussed above; [[canonical_form#RREF|link here]]); instead, it is ''normalized'', which — similarly to reduced — is a two-part constraint. Where reduced requires that all pivots be exactly equal to 1, normalized requires only that all pivots be positive (positive integers, of course, due to the other integer constraint). And where reduced requires that all entries in pivot columns besides the pivots are exactly equal to 0, normalized requires only that all entries in pivot columns below the pivots are exactly equal to 0, while entries in pivot columns above the pivots only have to be strictly less than the pivot in the respective column (while still being non-negative).<ref group="note">The exact criteria for HNF are not always consistently agreed upon, however.</ref><ref group="note">We are using "row-style" Hermite Normal Form here, not "column-style"; the latter would involve simply flipping everything 90 degrees so that the echelon requirement was that pivots be strictly ''below'' the pivots in the previous ''column'', and that pivot ''rows'' are considered for the normalization constraint rather than pivot ''columns''.</ref> In other words, elements above the pivot have to be reduced modulo the pivot. The normalization HNF uses is cool because this constraint, while strictly less strict than the reduced constraint used by RREF, is still strict enough to ensure uniqueness, but loose enough to ensure the integer constraint can be simultaneously satisfied, where RREF cannot ensure that.