Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-year-2-of-the-natural-sciences-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2023/paper-1/5/d/solution

The required actions have already been identified:
In three dimensions choose a unit vector perpendicular to both. Its one-dimensional orthogonal complement to the pair is invariant under . On a one-dimensional real space, a skew-symmetric matrix must act as zero: would imply . Thus .
The columns of form an orthonormal basis, so is an orthogonal matrix. The displayed actions give
and therefore
If , take and any orthogonal matrix . Otherwise its nonzero two-dimensional block supplies the pair used above.

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