In mathematics, the conjugate transpose or Hermitian transpose of an m-by-n matrix  with complex entries is the n-by-m matrix ^* obtained from by taking the transpose and then taking the complex conjugate of each entry (i.e., negating their imaginary parts but not their real parts). The conjugate transpose is formally defined by

where the subscripts denote the i,j-th entry, for 1 = i = n and 1 = j = m, and the overbar denotes a scalar complex conjugate. (The complex conjugate of , where a and b are reals, is .)