A TOPOLOGICAL PROOF OF THE PERRON-FROBENIUS THEOREM

In this article we prove a version of the Perron-Frobenius Theorem in linear algebra using the Brouwer's Fixed Point Theorem in topology. We will mostly concentrate on he qualitative aspect of the Perron-Frobenius Theorem rather than quantitative formulas, which would be enough for theoretical investigations in ergodic theory. By the nature of the method of the proof, we do not expect to obtain a numerical estimate. But we may regard it worthwhile to see why a certain type of result should be true from a topological and geometrical viewpoint. However, a geometric argument alone would give us a sharp numerical bounds on the size of the eigenvalue as shown in Section 2. Eigenvectors of a matrix A will be fixed points of a certain mapping defined in terms of A. We shall modify an existing proof of Frobenius Theorem and that will do the trick for Perron-Frobenius Theorem.