Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2025/ii/paper-4/40d/b/solution

Write
where and are the strict lower and upper triangular parts. The Jacobi method is
with iteration matrix
Here is symmetric, so . Regard the iteration as the splitting
Let
Because is tridiagonal, changing alternating signs reverses the sign of every off-diagonal entry while preserving every diagonal entry. Therefore
Since and is positive definite, is positive definite. The Householder-John theorem now gives
The Jacobi iterates therefore converge to the unique solution for every starting vector, which is the jacobi convergence for a symmetric positive-definite tridiagonal matrix.

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