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Question: Faulty constructor for a hermitian matrix ?

Question:Faulty constructor for a hermitian matrix ?

John Fredsted 2238
matrix physics hermitian
December 20 2013
0

Consider the following Matrix constructor:

M := Matrix(3,(i,j) -> a||i||j + I*b||i||j,shape = hermitian);

It generates the following output:

That appears to me to be definitely wrong, a hermitian matrix allowing nonzero real-valued diagonal elements (otherwise quantum mechanics would be a rather vacuous theory). For shape = antihermitian, the diagonal still contains only zeros, even though it should contain nonzero purely complex-imaginary elements. Have I fundamentally misunderstood something?

PS: I was aware of this shortcoming back in Maple 9.5 (the previous version I have been working with), there manually circumventing it, but I certainly expected that it had been fixed since then.
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