The antitriangular factorization of skew-symmetric matrices

Abstract

In this paper we develop algorithms for orthogonal similarity transformations of skew-symmetric matrices to simpler forms. The first algorithm is similar to the algorithm for the block antitriangular factorization of symmetric matrices, but in the case of skew-symmetric matrices, an antitriangular form is always obtained. Moreover, a simple two-sided permutation of the antitriangular form transforms the matrix into a multi-arrowhead matrix. In addition, we show that the block antitriangular form of the skew-Hermitian matrices has the same structure as the block antitriangular form of the symmetric matrices.