Abstract
In the 1880s and early 1890s, the Prague mathematician Eduard Weyr published his important results in matrix theory. His works represented the only significant contribution to matrix theory by Czech mathematicians in many decades that followed.
Although Eduard Weyr was one of the few European mathematicians acquainted with matrix theory and working in it at that time, his results did not gain recognition for about a century. Eduard Weyr discovered the Weyr characteristic, which is a dual sequence to the better known Segre characteristic, and also the so-called typical form.
This canonical form of a matrix is nowadays called the Weyr canonical form. It is permutationally similar to the commonly used Jordan canonical form of the same matrix and it outperforms the Jordan canonical form in some mathematical situations.
The Weyr canonical form has become much better known in the last few years and even a monograph dedicated to this topic was published in 2011.