Example:

for what values of 𝜶 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝜷 the following system of equation

𝒙+𝒚+𝒛=𝟔
𝒙 + 𝟐𝒚 + 𝟑𝒛 = 𝟏𝟎
𝒙 + 𝟐𝒚 + 𝜶𝒛 = 𝜷
Has a) no solution
b ) unique solution
c ) infinitely many solutions
Solution :
1 1 1 6 1 1 1 6 1 1 1 6
(A b)=(1 2 3 10) ~ (0 1 2 4 ) ~ (0 1 2 4 )
1 2 𝛼 𝛽 0 1 𝛼−1 𝛽−6 0 0 𝛼 − 3 𝛽 − 10
1) 𝛼 ≠ 3, 𝛽𝜖𝑅
r(A)=3=r(A b)=3=n
∴the system is consistent and has a unique solution.

2) 𝛼 = 3, 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝛽 ≠ 10
r(A)=2≠ 𝑟(𝐴 b)=3
the system is inconsistent and has no solution.

3) 𝛼 = 3, 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝛽 = 10
r(A b) =r(A)=2
consistent and has infinitely many solutions.
Example:
Discuss the consistency of the following system for all values of ⅄.
𝒙 + 𝟐𝒚 + 𝒛 = 𝟑
𝒙+𝒚+𝒛=⅄
𝟑𝒙 + 𝒚 + 𝟑𝒛 = ⅄²

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Solution :
(A b)=
1 2 1 3 1 2 1 3 1 2 1 3
(1 1 1 ⅄ ) ~ (0 −1 0 ⅄ − 3 ) ~ (0 −1 0 ⅄−3 )
3 1 3 ⅄2 0 −5 0 ⅄2 − 9 0 0 0 ⅄2 − 9 − 5⅄ + 15
⅄² -5⅄ +6=0 (⅄-2)(⅄-3)=0, ⅄=2 ,⅄=3
1) ⅄≠ 2 and ⅄≠ 3 ,𝑟(𝐴) ≠ 𝑟(𝐴 𝑏),
The system is inconsistent and has no solution.
2) ⅄=2 or ⅄=3 𝑟(𝐴) = 𝑟(𝐴 𝑏) = 2 < 3
The system is consistent and has infinitely many solutions.
Homogeneous systems:
A system of linear equations is said to be homogeneous if it can be written in the
form 𝐴𝑋 = 0.
To solve a homogeneous system 𝐴𝑋 = 0 in 𝑛 unknowns, we perform the
following steps:
Step 1:
Apply elementary row operations on the matrix 𝐴 to transform it into row
echelon form.
Step 2:
From the obtained echelon form, we can find 𝑟𝑎𝑛𝑘(𝐴).
We have the following two cases:
Case 1: If 𝑟𝑎𝑛𝑘 (𝐴) = 𝑛 , then the system has only the zero solution (trivial
solution)
Case 2: If 𝑟𝑎𝑛𝑘 (𝐴) < 𝑛, then the system has infinitely many solutions (non-
trivial solution)

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Theorem:
A homogeneous linear system with more unknowns than equations has infinitely
many solutions.
‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
Example:
Solve the following linear system
𝒙 + 𝟐𝒚 + 𝒛 = 𝟎
𝟑𝒙 + 𝟖𝒚 + 𝟕𝒛 = 𝟎
𝟐𝒙 + 𝟕𝒚 + 𝟗𝒛 = 𝟎
Solution:
The system can be written in the form 𝐴𝑋 = 0 , where
1 2 1 𝑥
𝐴 = (3 8 7) 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑋 = (𝑦)
2 7 9 𝑧
1 2 1 −3𝑅1 + 𝑅2 1 2 1 1 1 2 1
𝐴 = (3 8 7) ~ (0 2 4) 2 𝑅2 (0 1 2)
2 7 9 −2𝑅1 + 𝑅3 0 3 7 ~ 0 3 7
1 2 1
−3𝑅2 + 𝑅3
(0 1 2) 𝑟(𝐴) = 3 = 𝑛
~
0 0 1
∴ 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑠𝑦𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑚 ℎ𝑎𝑠 𝑜𝑛𝑙𝑦 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑡𝑟𝑖𝑣𝑖𝑎𝑙 𝑠𝑜𝑙𝑢𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 (𝑧𝑒𝑟𝑜 𝑠𝑜𝑙𝑢𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 ),
i.e., 𝑥 = 𝑦 = 𝑧 = 0.
Example:
Solve the system
𝒙 + 𝟑𝒚 + 𝟐𝒛 + 𝒖 = 𝟎
𝟐𝒙 + 𝟕𝒚 + 𝟒𝒛 =𝟎
𝟐𝒙 + 𝟔𝒚 + 𝟓𝒛 + 𝟒𝒖 = 𝟎

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Solution:
The system can be written in the form 𝐴𝑋 = 0 , where

1 3 2 1 −2𝑅1 + 𝑅2 ① 3 2 1
𝐴 = (2 7 4 0) ~ (0 ① 0 −2)
2 6 5 4 −2𝑅1 + 𝑅3 0 0 ① 2
r(A)=3 < 𝑛 = 4
The system has infinitely many solutions 𝑥, 𝑦, 𝑧 are leading variables and
u is free variable, let 𝑢 = 𝑡
∴ 𝑥 + 3𝑦 + 2𝑧 + 𝑢 = 0
𝑦 − 2𝑢 = 0
𝑧 + 2𝑢 = 0
∴ 𝑧 = −2𝑡, 𝑦 = 2𝑡 , 𝑥 = −3𝑦 − 2𝑧 − 𝑢 = −3𝑡
𝑥 −3𝑡 −3
𝑦 2
∴ 𝑋 = ( ) = ( 2𝑡 ) = ( ) 𝑡.
𝑧 −2𝑡 −2
𝑢 𝑡 1
Theorem:
Let 𝑨 be a square matrix of order 𝒏. Then the system 𝑨𝑿 = 𝟎 has a
non-trivial solution if |𝑨| = 𝟎.
Theorem:
Let 𝐴 be a square matrix of order 𝑛, then the following statement are equivalent:
(1) 𝐴 is invertible (|𝐴| ≠ 0 ).
(2) Rank of 𝐴 is 𝑛.
(3) The system 𝐴𝑋 = 𝑏 has a unique solution.
(4) The system 𝐴𝑋 = 0 has only the trivial solution.

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Applications of Systems of Linear Equations
Systems of linear equations arise in a wide variety of applications and are one of the
central themes in linear algebra.

1. Network Flow
A network flow consists of a set of points called a junction or nodes with lines or
arcs called branches connection some or all junctions. The direction of flow in each
branch is indicated, and the flow amount (or rate) is either shown or is denoted by a
variable.
The basic assumption of network flow is that:
1. The total flow into the network equals the total flow out of the network.
2. The total flow into a junction equals the total flow out of the junction.
Example:
The network in the following figure shows the traffic flow (in cars per hour) over
several one-way streets in the downtown Baltimore during a typical early afternoon.
Determine the general flow pattern for the network

Solution:
Write equations that describe the flow, and then fund the general solution of the
system. Label the street intersections (junctions) and the unknown flows in the
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branches, as shown in the figure. At each intersection, the set flow in equal to the
flow out.

Also the total flow into the network (500+300+100+400) equals the total flow out
of the network (300 + 𝑥3 + 600) , which simplifies 𝑥3 = 400.
We obtain the following system of equations:

𝑥1 + 𝑥2 = 800
𝑥2 − 𝑥3 + 𝑥4 = 300
𝑥4 + 𝑥5 = 500
𝑥1 + 𝑥5 = 600
𝑥3 = 400

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A negative flow in a network branch corresponds to flow in the direction opposite
to that shown on the model. Science the streets in this problem are one -way, none
of the variables here can be negative. This fact leads to certain limitations on the
possible values of the variables. For instance, 𝑥5 ≤ 500 because 𝑥4 cannot be
negative.

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2-Analysis of an electrical network

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