An elementary and constructive solution to Hilbert's 17th Problem for matrices

Abstract

We give a short and elementary proof of a theorem of Procesi, Schacher and (independently) Gondard, Ribenboim that generalizes a famous result of Artin. Let $A$ be an $n \times n$ symmetric matrix with entries in the polynomial ring $\mathbb R[x_1,...,x_m]$. The result is that if $A$ is postive semidefinite for all substitutions $(x_1,...,x_m) \in \mathbb R^m$, then $A$ can be expressed as a sum of squares of symmetric matrices with entries in $\mathbb R(x_1,...,x_m)$. Moreover, our proof is constructive and gives explicit representations modulo the scalar case.