Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-options-ii-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2011/p/p4/d/solution

Multiply by to get the equivalent triangular system
For nonsingular , compute and use back substitution:
Orthogonal transformations preserve the Euclidean norm, making this a numerically stable reduction. The factors can be applied as stored Householder transformations without explicitly forming .
Since is invertible, is singular exactly when is singular. For an upper triangular matrix,
Thus a singular forces at least one zero diagonal entry in . In that case, ordinary division-based back substitution must be replaced by a consistency/rank analysis: the system may have no solution or infinitely many solutions, and a rank-revealing factorization can identify the free parameters.

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