Inversion of circulant matrices over

In this paper we consider the problem of inverting an circulant matrix with entries over . We show that the algorithm for inverting circulants, based on the reduction to diagonal form by means of FFT, has some drawbacks when working over . We present three different algorithms which do not use this approach. Our algorithms require different degrees of knowledge of and , and their costs range, roughly, from to operations over . Moreover, for each algorithm we give the cost in terms of bit operations. We also present an algorithm for the inversion of finitely generated bi-infinite Toeplitz matrices. The problems considered in this paper have applications to the theory of linear cellular automata.