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13.5
Finding Eigenvalues
and
Eigenvectors
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1
13.5
Finding the Eigenvalues and
Eigenvectors
of
a Real
Symmetric Matrix
If
the real symmetric matrix
A
is diagonal, then the process of
finding its eigenvalues and eigenvectors is trivial: the eigenvalues are
just the diagonal elements, and the eigenvectors are just unit vectors in
the coordinate directions. If it were possible to find a transformation
that diagonalized a matrix while preserving lengths, then the eigen-
value problem would essentially be solved. The eigenvalues in both
coordinate systems would be the same, and the eigenvectors could
easily be rotated back into the original coordinate system. (In fact,
since they are unit vectors in the transformed coordinate system, they
simply
are
the elements of the inverse transform.)
Unfortunately, there is no known method of finding a finite number
of unitary transformations that accomplish this goal. It is possible,
however, to reduce an arbitrary matrix to either bi-diagonal or tri-diag-
onal form by pre- and postmultiplying by a succession of Householder
transformations. The zeros are placed alternately in the rows and
columns, starting two elements from the main diagonal
(Fig.
13.4).
The tri-diagonal form is symmetric, and therefore simpler to work
with. We shall assume that this triangularization has been performed
on the matrix
A.
At this point there are two possible ways to proceed. One method is
to try to further reduce the tri-diagonal matrix into a diagonal one.
Although this cannot be done with a finite number of transformations,
it can be accomplished with an infinite succession
of
Givens rotations.
In practice, only a finite number of rotations need be applied, since at
some point the off-diagonal elements become sufficiently small to be
ignored. We shall discuss this method in the section on singular-value
decomposition (Section
13.6).
post
L
Fig.
13.4. Tri-diagonalization of a square matrix
by
alternate pre- and post-multiplica-
tion
by
Householder transformations.