Compounding Doubly Affine Matrices

Weighted sums of left and right hand Kronecker products of Integer Sequence Doubly Affine (ISDA) as well as Generalized Arithmetic Progression Doubly Affine (GAPDA) arrays are used to generate larger ISDA arrays of multiplicative order (compound squares) from pairs of smaller ones. In two dimensions we find general expressions for the eigenvalues (EVs) and singular values (SVs) of the larger arrays in terms of the EVs and SVs of their constituent matrices, leading to a simple result for the rank of these highly singular compound matrices. Since the critical property of the smaller constituent matrices involves only identical row and column sums (often called semi-magic), the eigenvalue and singular value results can be applied to both magic squares and Latin squares. Additionally, the compounding process works in arbitrary dimensions due to the generality of the Kronecker product, providing a simple method to generate large order ISDA cubes and hypercubes. The first examples of compound magic squares are found in manuscripts that date back to the 10th century CE, and other representative applications are outlined through judicious examples.

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