  This article deals with the computation of the characteristic polynomial of
dense matrices over small finite fields and over the integers. We first present
two algorithms for the finite fields: one is based on Krylov iterates and
Gaussian elimination. We compare it to an improvement of the second algorithm
of Keller-Gehrig. Then we show that a generalization of Keller-Gehrig's third
algorithm could improve both complexity and computational time. We use these
results as a basis for the computation of the characteristic polynomial of
integer matrices. We first use early termination and Chinese remaindering for
dense matrices. Then a probabilistic approach, based on integer minimal
polynomial and Hensel factorization, is particularly well suited to sparse
and/or structured matrices.
