Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2016/ib/paper-2/19d/c/ii/solution

The orthogonal matrix preserves the Euclidean norm, so
The first three entries of can be set to zero by backward substitution in a triangular system, while its fourth entry is always . Solving the triangular system gives , , and . Thus the unique least-squares solution and residual norm are
Uniqueness follows from the nonzero diagonal entries of the top triangular block, equivalently the full column rank of .

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