Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge / 2002 / ib / Paper 2 / 15G / b

Choose an invertible change-of-basis matrix $P$ so that $J=PT{P}^{-1}$ is the Jordan normal form of $T$. Write each block aswhere $N_{m_j}$ has ones on its first superdiagonal and all other entries zero. DefineEvery ${\lambda }_j\ne 0$ because $T$ is invertible, so $D_0$ is an invertible diagonal matrix. The matrix $N$ is strictly upper triangular and hence nilpotent. On each block $D_0$ is a scalar multiple of the identity, so it commutes with $N$ on that block and therefore on the whole space. This gives