“…The study on the possible ranks of matrix equations can be traced back to 1970s (see [1,[18][19][20]29]). Recently, the extremal ranks, i.e., maximal and minimal ranks, of some matrix expressions have found many applications in control theory (see [2,4]), statistics, and economics (see [22,23,28]), and hence this topic has been revisited in [3,15,[25][26][27][32][33][34][35].…”