Sum of diagonal elements in a matrix

Question

I am trying to find out the sum of the diagonal elements in a matrix. Here, n is the size of the square matrix and a is the matrix. Can someone explain this to me what is happen

Answer 1

Try this for summing your second diagonal:

sum(a[i][n-i-1] for i in range(n))

The inner loop accesses these entries:

>>> n = 3
>>> [(i, n-i-1) for i in range(n)]
[(0, 2), (1, 1), (2, 0)]

And the summed value of this diagonal for your sample matrix is:

>>> n = 3
>>> sum(a[i][n-i-1] for i in range(n))
19

The mistake in your code is to use the same expression for both dimensions:

a[n-i-1][n-i-1]

which will process the first diagonal again in reverse order [(2, 2), (1, 1), (0, 0)] giving you the same sum twice.