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Question: Avoid getting an inconsistent system result when using ReducedRowEchelonForm

Question:Avoid getting an inconsistent system result when using ReducedRowEchelonForm

rtalbert 12 Maple
algebra linear
February 12 2008
0
This is a problem that happens with my linear algebra students and Maple every year, and I have no idea how to fix it. This is my first post so perhaps this has been discussed before. I have a 3x3 matrix: 27.6 30.2 162 3100 6400 23610 250 360 1623 When I use ReducedRowEchelonForm, the result is the identity matrix. But in fact the bottom row should zero out in the row-reduction process, and the reduced echelon form is supposed to be 1 0 3.9 0 1 1.8 0 0 0 In general, square matrices with decimal entries tend to row-reduce to the identity matrix even when they are not supposed to, because the 3-3 entry ends up being approximated by a number very close to 0 instead of actually equalling 0. So the question is, how do I get ReducedRowEchelonForm to stop doing this?
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