On the sparsity of non-diagonalisable integer matrices and matrices with a given discriminant
Number Theory
2026-03-26 v4
Abstract
We consider the set of -matrices with integer elements of size at most and obtain upper bounds on the number of matrices from , for which the characteristic polynomial has a fixed discriminant . When , this corresponds to counting matrices with a repeated eigenvalue, and thus is related to counting non-diagonalisable matrices. For , this problem seems not to have been studied previously, while for , both our approach and the final result improve on those of A. J. Hetzel, J. S. Liew and K. Morrison (2007).
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2312.12626,
title = {On the sparsity of non-diagonalisable integer matrices and matrices with a given discriminant},
author = {Alina Ostafe and Igor E. Shparlinski},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.12626},
year = {2026}
}