Abstract

This paper contains a new approach to some classical theorems of linear algebra (Steinitz, matrix rank, Rouche-Kronecker-Capelli, Farkas, Weyl, Minkowski). The constructive proofs are based on pivoting. Defining pivoting in a more general way - using generating tableaux - made it possible to give a new proof for Steinitz theorem as well. Our pivot selection strategies are based essentially on Bland's [2] minimal index rule. The famous theorems of Farkas, Weyl and Minkowski are proved by using pivot tableaux. Theorem 4.1 is essentially a new, very simple form of the alternative theorem of linear inequalities, and its proof is a pretty application of the minimal index rule. One can apply this theorem and its proof to combinatorial structures (for example to oriented matroids) as well (Klafszky-Terlaky [9]). The presented algorithms are mainly not efficient computationally (see e.g. Roos [13] for an exponential example), but they are surpisingly simple. We will use the symbols 0; +; \Gamma; \Phi; \Psi introduced by Balinski-Tucker [1], which denote zero, positive, negative, nonnegative and nonpositive numbers respectively. On the other hand Gale's [7] notations will be used, so matrices and vectors are denoted by capital and small Latin letters and their components are denoted by the corresponding Greek letters. Index sets are denoted by I and J (with proper subscripts) and the cardinality of an index set J is denoted by k J k. 2 Pivoting

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