Zero Matrix has an Inverse over Finite Field?

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Looks like this bug is still present in current versions too. As far as I can see, it's limited to non-prime finite fields of characteristic 2 (which have their own implementation), and it does seem to apply to non-invertible square matrices of size larger than 1 too. I wasn't able to find a trac ticket for it, so please do report (should it be reported already, we can manage then). There's a good chance it's not too difficult to fix once someone with knowledge of the code looks at it.

Thanks for reporting this bug here and on Sage Trac:

• Sage Trac ticket #30161: Zero Matrix has Inverse over Finite Field

To analyse the error coming from:

sage: M = Matrix([0], ring=GF(4))
sage: M
[0]
sage: M.inverse()
[1]

we can check the documentation and the source code for the inverse method of M:

sage: M.inverse?
sage: M.inverse??

and we see that it calls ~M. In Sage, ~M calls M.__invert__().

The source code for the __invert__ method revealed by

sage: M.__invert__??

involves mzed_invert_newton_john from m4rie.

The source code for that function is at

• https://github.com/malb/m4rie/blob/9f...

and it echelonizes the augmented matrix to compute the inverse --- a fine thing to do for an invertible matrix.

There is now a fix at the Sage Trac ticket. After the fix, we first check whether the matrix has full rank; if not, we raise an error; if yes, we compute the inverse by echelonizing the augmented matrix.