Question

This afternoon I was speaking with some graduate students in the department and we came to the following quandry;

Is there a geometric interpretation of the trace of a matrix?

This question should make fair sense because trace is coordinate independent.

A few other comments. We were hoping for something like:

"determinant is the volume of the parallelepiped spanned by column vectors."

This is nice because it captures the geometry simply, and it holds for any old set of vectors over $\mathbb{R}^n$.

The divergence application of trace is somewhat interesting, but again, not really what we are looking for.

Also, after looking at the wiki entry, I don't get it. This then requires a matrix function, and I still don't really see the relationship.

One last thing that we came up with; the trace of a matrix is the same as the sum of the eigenvalues. Since eigenvalues can be seen as the eccentricity of ellipse, trace may correspond geometrically to this. But we could not make sense of this.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Let's use $\det(\exp(tA)) = 1 + t\ Tr(A) + O(t^2)$, and think about the vector ODE $\vec y' = T \vec y$, solved by $\vec y(t) = \exp(tA) \vec y(0)$. If we take a unit parallelepiped worth of $\vec y(0)$, flow for short time $t$ under $\vec y' = T\vec y$, and see how its volume changes, the change will thus be $t\ Tr(A)$ to first order.

Ah, Yemon Choi beat me to part of that.

Answer 2

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this yet, but the trace defines a Hermitian inner product on the space of linear operators from $\mathbb{C}^n$ to $\mathbb{C}^m$: $$\langle A, B\rangle = \text{Tr}\ A^\dagger B.$$ You can't get much more geometric than that.

Answer 3

If you are just working in a finite-dimensional Euclidean space, then by using the fact that we can calculate the trace of $A$ as $\sum_{j=1}^n \langle Ae_j, e_j\rangle$ for $any$ choice of orthonormal basis $e_1,\dots, e_n$, one obtains

${\rm Tr}(A) = \int_{x\in B} \langle Ax, x\rangle \,dm(x)$

where $B$ is the Euclidean unit sphere, and $m$ is the uniform measure on $B$ normalised to have total mass $1$. This is perhaps not quite as geometric as you want, but perhaps seems less dependent on a choice of coordinates.

Also, the wikipedia page refers to the trace as being (related to) the derivative of the determinant -- does that not seem `geometric'?

Answer 4

If your matrix is geometrically projection (algebraically $A^2=A$) then the trace is the dimension of the space that is being projected onto. This is quite important in representation theory.

Answer 5

I've pondered this question quite a bit, because I love the geometric definition of the determinant.^ My current feeling is that, although the trace has a beautiful geometric meaning (the one given by Allen Knutson), its raison d'être is fundamentally algebraic:

Let $V$ be a finite-dimensional vector space over the field $F$, and let $L(V)$ be the set of linear maps from $V$ to itself. The trace is the unique (up to normalization) linear map from $L(V)$ to $F$ such that $\text{tr}(AB) = \text{tr}(BA)$ for all $A, B \in L(V)$.

This is my favorite definition to date, but I suspect that the trace has a deeper meaning: it's what you get when a linear map eats itself. I can't explain exactly what I mean by that, but here's some evidence in favor of it:

• Because $V$ is finite-dimensional, you can think of a linear map from $V$ to itself as an element of $V^* \otimes V$. If $A = \omega_1 \otimes v_1 + \ldots + \omega_k \otimes v_k$, then $\text{tr}(A) = \omega_1(v_1) + \ldots + \omega_k(v_k)$.

• In the abstract index notation used in general relativity (See Robert Wald's book for a great introduction), a vector $v$ would be written $v^a$, a linear map $A$ would be written ${A^a}_b$, and the vector $Av$ would be written ${A^a}_b v^b$. The indices show you that $v$ is being plugged into the input slot of $A$, and another vector is coming out the output slot. The trace of $A$ would be written ${A^a}_a$, which seems to represent the output of $A$ being plugged back into the input!

If someone could explain to me how the geometric, algebraic, and "self-eating" (autophagic?) meanings of the trace were related to each other, I would be very happy!

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^ In fact, I love it so much that I'll repeat my favorite statement of it here! Let $V$ be a $n$-dimensional vector space over the field $F$. A signed-volume form on $V$ is a map from $V^n$ to $F$ with the following properties:

1. It gets multiplied by $\lambda$ if you multiplying one of its arguments by $\lambda$.
2. It doesn't change if you add one of its arguments to another of its arguments.

The determinant of a linear map $A \colon V \to V$ is the scalar $\det(A)$ such that $D(A v_1, \ldots, A v_n) = \det(A) D(v_1, \ldots, v_n)$ for any vectors $v_1, \ldots, v_n$ and any signed-volume form $D$.

A single number can satisfy this equation for all signed-volume forms because the signed-volume form on $V$ is unique up to normalization.

Answer 6

This has been lurking implicitly beneath several of the comments so far, but just to make it completely explicit why the trace of a linear operator is independent of a choice of coordinates: the multicategory of vector spaces and multilinear maps arises from a monoidal structure on the category of vector spaces and linear maps, this monoidal structure [tensor product of vector spaces] turning out to be symmetric and closed. From this, we can construct a canonical (linear) map of type $Hom(A, 1) \otimes B \rightarrow Hom(A, B)$, which, when $A$ is finite-dimensional, turns out to furthermore be an isomorphism. In particular, this gives an isomorphism between $Hom(A, 1) \otimes A$ and $Hom(A, A)$ for finite-dimensional $A$. Now, from the closed structure, we have a canonical map of type $Hom(A, 1) \otimes A \rightarrow 1$ as well. Pulling this through the aforementioned isomorphism, we obtain a map of type $Hom(A, A) \rightarrow 1$ whenever $A$ is finite-dimensional; this map is the trace operator, defined directly on abstract vector spaces and thus coordinate independent.

Phrasing this in less categorical terms, what the above reasoning demonstrates is that there is a unique linear map $Trace$ from $Hom(A, A)$ to scalars such that $Trace(x \mapsto R(x)v) = R(v)$ for all vectors $v$ in $A$ and linear maps $R$ from $A$ to scalars (assuming, as always, that $A$ is finite-dimensional). Again, since this gives an abstract definition of $Trace$, it is immediately coordinate-independent.

Whether this should count as a geometric account is in the eye of the beholder; as far as I am concerned, suitably abstract linear algebra is directly geometric, but I could certainly understand feeling otherwise.

Answer 7

Traced monoidal categories are giving a nice geometrical interpretation of the trace : as a way to implement a feedback loop.

But, it is perhaps not the kind of geometrical interpretation you are interested in.

Answer 8

An easy calculation that may help somehow:

Any square matrix $A$ can be written as

$A = \Sigma_{i,j} u_i v_j^t$

where $u_i,v_j$ are column matrices, and there are many different choices as to how to choose {$u_i$}, {$v_j$}. Then it follows that

$Tr(A) = \Sigma_{i,j} Tr(u_i v_j^t) = \Sigma_{i,j} u_i \cdot v_j$

and now that you have a sum of dot products you may be able to make various geometric interpetations.