[Math] Relation between eigenvalues and rows or columns of a matrix

eigenvalues-eigenvectors

I am wondering about the relation between the eigenvalues of a matrix $A$ and it rows or columns. I mean can one say that $\lambda_1$ is related to $r_1$ (first row of $A$) or $c_1$ (first column of $A$)? I know you may ask then what is $\lambda_1$? But the question is, what is the relation between a specific eigenvalue of a matrix and a column or a row of the matrix?

If there is a relation between rows (or columns) and eigenvalues. Say that: $\lambda_1$ corresponds to $r_1$. If i take the transpose of A, since eigenvalues still are same, can I still say $\lambda_1$ corresponds to $r_1'$ (first row of $A'$).

This might be a little strange question, but i appreciate for any ideas.

Best Answer

Let's break this down (I'm going for more of an intuitive answer here):

When you multiply a matrix $M$ and a vector $v_i$, you take each row of the matrix and do an inner product with the vector to get the elements of the resulting vector $v_o$ -- so row 1 of $M$ times $v_i$ gets you the first element in $v_o$, row 2 of $M$ gets you the second element of $v_o$, etc.

If $v_i$ is an eigenvector of $M$, then multiplying them will give you a $v_o$ that is effectively $v_i$ times a constant, where the constant is the eigenvalue corresponding to the eigenvector.

Since the whole output vector ($v_o$) is a scalar multiple of the input vector ($v_i$), the eigenvalues cannot be directly related to specific rows of $M$; each element of $v_o$ only "interacted" with a single row of $M$ -- a different row for each element -- during the multiplication, but every element of $v_o$ was scaled by the same (eigen)value from the original elements in $v_i$.

As for the columns, every column of $M$ affects every element of the output vector, so how do we separate out the distinct eigenvalues?

The whole of $M$ can be seen as a transformation. For certain vectors, the transformation only ends up scaling that vector -- this is just a result of applying a particular transformation to a particular vector.