Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-year-1-of-the-natural-sciences-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2003/paper-2/6/solution

Use Gaussian elimination. The last equation gives , and the second then gives . Substitute these into the first equation to obtain . Back-substitution yields
The linear system has matrix form
The coefficients of the arbitrary right-hand side in the solved expressions are the rows of the matrix inverse. Therefore
Multiplying the original matrix by this candidate gives the identity matrix; its determinant is , so the solution is unique for every .

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