Abstract:
The paper discusses the possibility of reducing a square complex matrix $A$ to a direct sum of smaller matrices by using $*$-congruence transformations. It turns out that this possibility is related to appropriate partitions of the spectrum of the cosquare of $A$. This makes it possible to associate the direct summands of the sum with subsets of the latter spectrum.
Key words and phrases:$*$-congruence, bilinear form, cosquare of a nonsingular matrix, invariant subspace.