In matrix calculus, Jacobi's formula expresses the derivative of the determinant of a matrix A in terms of the adjugate of A and the derivative of A.
[1] If A is a differentiable map from the real numbers to n × n matrices, then where tr(X) is the trace of the matrix X and
(The latter equality only holds if A(t) is invertible.)
As a special case, Equivalently, if dA stands for the differential of A, the general formula is The formula is named after the mathematician Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi.
(Jacobi's formula) For any differentiable map A from the real numbers to n × n matrices, Proof.
Laplace's formula for the determinant of a matrix A can be stated as Notice that the summation is performed over some arbitrary row i of the matrix.
The determinant of A can be considered to be a function of the elements of A: so that, by the chain rule, its differential is This summation is performed over all n×n elements of the matrix.
To find ∂F/∂Aij consider that on the right hand side of Laplace's formula, the index i can be chosen at will.
(In order to optimize calculations: Any other choice would eventually yield the same result, but it could be much harder).
In particular, it can be chosen to match the first index of ∂ / ∂Aij: Thus, by the product rule, Now, if an element of a matrix Aij and a cofactor adjT(A)ik of element Aik lie on the same row (or column), then the cofactor will not be a function of Aij, because the cofactor of Aik is expressed in terms of elements not in its own row (nor column).
Thus, so All the elements of A are independent of each other, i.e. where δ is the Kronecker delta, so Therefore, Lemma 1.
This equation means that the differential of
, evaluated at the identity matrix, is equal to the trace.
is a linear operator that maps an n × n matrix to a real number.
Using the definition of a directional derivative together with one of its basic properties for differentiable functions, we have
of order n. It is closely related to the characteristic polynomial of
Consider the following function of X: We calculate the differential of
using Lemma 1, the equation above, and the chain rule: Theorem.
using the equation relating the adjugate of
Both sides of the Jacobi formula are polynomials in the matrix coefficients of A and A'.
It is therefore sufficient to verify the polynomial identity on the dense subset where the eigenvalues of A are distinct and nonzero.
and Since A has distinct eigenvalues, there exists a differentiable complex invertible matrix L such that
Then which is the Jacobi formula for matrices A with distinct nonzero eigenvalues.
The following is a useful relation connecting the trace to the determinant of the associated matrix exponential:
This statement is clear for diagonal matrices, and a proof of the general claim follows.
, in the previous section "Via Chain Rule", we showed that Considering
in this equation yields: The desired result follows as the solution to this ordinary differential equation.
Several forms of the formula underlie the Faddeev–LeVerrier algorithm for computing the characteristic polynomial, and explicit applications of the Cayley–Hamilton theorem.
For example, starting from the following equation, which was proved above: and using
, we get: where adj denotes the adjugate matrix.