Invertibility of Submatrices of Pascal's Matrix and Birkhoff Interpolation

Abstract

The infinite upper triangular Pascal matrix is $T = [\binom{j}{i}]$ for $0\leq i,j$. It is easy to see that any leading principle square submatrix is triangular with determinant $1$, hence invertible. In this paper, we investigate the invertibility of arbitrary square submatrices $T_{r,c}$ comprised of rows $r=[r_0,\ldots,r_m]$ and columns $c=[c_0,\ldots,c_m]$ of $T$. We show that $T_{r,c}$ is invertible iff $r \leq c$ (i.e., $r_i \leq c_i$ for $i=0, \ldots, m$), or equivalently, iff all diagonal entries are nonzero. To prove this result we establish a connection between the invertibility of these submatrices and polynomial interpolation. In particular, we apply the theory of Birkhoff interpolation and \polya{} systems.