Factoring Matrices into the Product of Circulant and Diagonal Matrices

A generic matrix is shown to be the product of circulant and diagonal matrices with the number of factors being at most. The demonstration is constructive, relying on first factoring matrix subspaces equivalent to polynomials in a permutation matrix over diagonal matrices into linear factors. For the linear factors, the sum of two scaled permutations is factored into the product of a circulant matrix and two diagonal matrices. Extending the monomial group, both low degree and sparse polynomials in a permutation matrix over diagonal matrices, together with their permutation equivalences, constitute a fundamental sparse matrix structure. Matrix analysis gets largely done polynomially, in terms of permutations only.