Given A=((-1, 2), (3, 4)) and B=((-4, 3), (5, -2)), how do you find A^-1?

1 Answer
May 28, 2016

A^{-1}=((-2/5, 1/5),(3/10, 1/10)).

Explanation:

There is a rule to calculate the inverse of a 2\times 2 matrix.
If we have a matrix M with components
M=((a, b),(c, d)) the inverse is
M^{-1}=1/(ad-bc)((d, -b),(-c, a)).

We can apply this to the matrix A and obtain

A^{-1}=1/(-1*4-2*3)((4,-2),(-3,-1))
=1/(-10)((4, -2),(-3, -1))
=((-4/10, 2/10),(3/10, 1/10))
=((-2/5, 1/5),(3/10, 1/10)).

Unfortunately I do not understand what should be the role of B because to invert a matrix you don't need another matrix.