Abstract: The aim of this note is to compute the Grothendieck group of the category of endomorphisms. This computation mostly plays with linear algebra. The main result is that in
, every endomorphism
is uniquely characterized by
and its characteristic polynomial
. This computation was due to [1]. We will explain how to think about this computation, the reason for certain constructions and the “diagonalization” in this computation.
Edit history: fixed some mislabeling of diagrams (Mar 21 2022)
[1] Almkvist, G. (1974). The Grothendieck ring of the category of endomorphisms. Journal of Algebra, 28(3), 375-388.