On the computation of the nth power of a matrix

Abstract

In this note we discuss the problem of finding the nth power of a matrix which is strongly connected to the study of Markov chains and others mathematical topics. We observe the known fact (but maybe not well known) that the Cayley-Hamilton theorem is of key importance to this goal. We also demonstrate the classical Gauss elimination technique as a tool to compute the minimum polynomial of a matrix without necessarily know the characteristic polynomial.