English

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 Mn(Z;H)\mathcal M_n(\mathbb Z; H) of n×nn\times n-matrices with integer elements of size at most HH and obtain upper bounds on the number of matrices from Mn(Z;H)\mathcal M_n(\mathbb Z; H), for which the characteristic polynomial has a fixed discriminant dd. When d=0d=0, this corresponds to counting matrices with a repeated eigenvalue, and thus is related to counting non-diagonalisable matrices. For d0d\ne 0, this problem seems not to have been studied previously, while for d=0d=0, 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}
}