Finding the Jordan canonical form of this upper triangular $3\times3$ matrix
Since this is a very small matrix there's actually no need to explicitly find the Jordan form by going through the routine tedious procedure. You know the characteristic polynomial is $$p(x) = (x-1)^2(x-3)$$ and you can check that the minimal polynomial is the same. This means a few things.
- You have a single Jordan block corresponding to $3$. This is just $(3)$.
- You cannot have two Jordan blocks corresponding to $1$ since that would make the matrix diagonalizable (which it is not since the minimal polynomial does not split into distinct factors). Therefore you must have a single block of the form $\begin{pmatrix}1 & 1 \\ 0 & 1\end{pmatrix}$
These combined gives you the form (up to order of the blocks) $$J=\begin{pmatrix}1 & 1 & 0 \\ 0 & 1 & 0 \\ 0& 0 & 3\end{pmatrix}$$
In general, for small matrices like these (anything up to $6\times 6$) you can find the Jordan form through similar types of analysis using the facts
- The geometric multiplicity of an eigenvalue is the number of blocks corresponding to it.
- The algebraic multiplicity of an eigenvalue is the sum of the total sizes of the blocks.
- The exponent of the term corresponding to an eigenvalue in the minimal polynomial is the size of the largest block.
The Jordan Canonical form of this matrix is $$ \begin{pmatrix} 1 & 1 & 0 \\ 0 & 1 & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 3 \end{pmatrix} .$$
You can read about Jordan Canonical forms here. Especially in section Complex matrices the properties listed there can help you find the Jordan Canonical form of most matrices.