Applied linear operators and spectral methods/Lecture 3
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[edit] Review
In the last lecture we talked about norms in inner product spaces. The induced norm was defined as
We also talked about orthonomal bases and biorthonormal bases. The biorthonormal bases may be thought of as dual bases in the sense that covariant and contravariant vector bases are dual.
The last thing we talked about was the idea of a linear operator. Recall that
where the summation is on the first index.
In this lecture we will learn about adjoint operators, Jacobi tridiagonalization, and a bit about the spectral theory of matrices.
[edit] Adjoint operator
Assume that we have a vector space with an orthonormal basis. Then
One specific matrix connected with
is the Hermitian conjugate matrix. This matrix is defined as
The linear operator
connected with the Hermitian matrix is called the adjoint operator and is defined as
Therefore,
and
More generally, if
then
Since the above relation does not involve the basis we see that the adjoint operator is also basis independent.
[edit] Self-adjoint/Hermitian matrices
If
we say that
is self-adjoint, i.e.,
in any orthonomal basis, and the matrix Aij is said to be Hermitian.
[edit] Anti-Hermitian matrices
A matrix
is anti-Hermitian if
There is a close connection between Hermitian and anti-Hermitian matrices. Consider a matrix
. Then
[edit] Jacobi Tridiagonalization
Let
be self-adjoint and suppose that we want to solve
where λ is constant. We expect that
If
is "sufficiently" small, then
This suggest that the solution should be in the subspace spanned by
.
Let us apply the Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization procedure where
Then we have
This is clearly a linear combination of
. Therefore,
is a linear combination of
. This is the same as saying that
is a linear combination of
.
Therefore,
Now,
But the self-adjointeness of
implies that
So Akn = 0 is k > n + 1 or n > k + 1. This is equivalent to expressing the operator
as a tridiagonal matrix
which has the form
In general, the matrix can be represented in block tridiagonal form.
Another consequence of the Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization is that
Lemma:
Every finite dimensional inner-product space has an orthonormal basis.
Proof:
The proof is trivial. Just use Gram-Schmidt on any basis for that space and normalize. 
A corollary of this is the following theorem.
Theorem:
Every finite dimensional inner product space is complete.
Recall that a space is complete is the limit of any Cauchy sequence from a subspace of that space must lie within that subspace.
Proof:
Let
be a Cauchy sequence of elements in the subspace
with
. Also let
be an orthonormal basis for the subspace
.
Then
where
By the Schwarz inequality
Therefore,
But the α~s are just numbers. So, for fixed i, {αki} is a Cauchy sequence in
(or
) and so converges to a number αi as
, i.e.,
which is is the subspace
. 
[edit] Spectral theory for matrices
Suppose
is expressed in coordinates relative to some basis
, i.e.,
Then
So
implies that
Now let us try to see the effect of a change to basis to a new basis
with
For the new basis to be linearly independent,
should be invertible so that
Now,
Hence
Similarly,
Therefore
So we have
In matrix form,
where the objects here are not operators or vectors but rather the matrices and vectors representing them. They are therefore basis dependent.
In other words, the matrix equation 
[edit] Similarity transformation
The transformation
is called a similarity transformation. Two matrices are equivalent or similar is there is a similarity transformation between them.
[edit] Diagonalizing a matrix
Suppose we want to find a similarity transformation which makes
diagonal, i.e.,
Then,
Let us write
(which is a
matrix) in terms of its columns
Then,
i.e.,
The pair
is said to be an eigenvalue pair if
where
is an eigenvector and λ is an eigenvalue.
Since
this means that λ is an eigenvalue if and only if
The quantity on the left hand side is called the characteristic polynomial and has n roots (counting multiplicities).
In
there is always one root. For that root
is singular, i.e., there always exists at least one eigenvector.
We will delve a bit more into the spectral theory of matrices in the next lecture.
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