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Sylvester's law of inertia says that any real quadratic form has coordinates in which it is a sum of $p$ positive squares minus $m$ negative squares, with $z$ unused coordinates, and that the numbers $(p,m,z)$ are invariant under every invertible linear change of coordinates. Its rank is $p+m$; its signature of a quadratic form is commonly $p-m$, with $(p,m)$ also called its signature pair.

The symmetric matrix here is $J-I$, where $J=11^T$ and $1=(1,\dots ,1{)}^T$. On the line spanned by $1$, $J-I$ has eigenvalue $n-1$. If ${\sum }_i{x}_i=0$, then $Jx=0$, so that the orthogonal complement has eigenvalue $-1$ with multiplicity $n-1$. Thus the off-diagonal all-ones quadratic form hasFor $n=1$ the form vanishes, so rank and scalar signature are both zero, with inertia $(0,0,1)$. Including this case is necessary because the distinguished eigenvalue then becomes zero.