Mathematics Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for people studying math at any level and professionals in related fields. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I heard from multiple sources that to obtain the rank of a matrix A, you must first do row reduction to get the row reduced echelon form of matrix A and count the number of non zero rows.
But then there are other sources that say i must use row reduction to get matrix A to ROW ECHELON FORM, and not row reduced echelon form.
So which is it? should i transform matrix A to row echelon form or row reduced echelon form to find the rank?
As soon as you have changed your matrix into triangular form, you know the rank of the matrix. The reduced row echelon form is a more complete row reduction, which yields the explicit solutions of a linear system.
