 Orthogonal change of coordinates

An orthogonal change of coordinates relates two orthonormal bases of a real inner product space. With the new basis vectors as columns of an orthogonal matrix $Q$, old and new coordinate columns obey $x=Qy$. Then $x^{T}x=y^{T}y$, so Euclidean norm, Euclidean distance and angles are preserved. A quadratic form $x^{T}Ax$ becomes $y^T(Q^{T}AQ)y$. For a symmetric matrix, orthogonal diagonalization chooses $Q$ so that the transformed quadratic form is a sum of eigenvalues times squared coordinates. This explains the principal-axis descriptions of a quadric surface.