When , the normalized sample principal component has Euclidean norm one. The vectors form an orthonormal set spanning the column space of a full-column-rank centered design matrix.
An eigenvalue of a matrix is a scalar for which for some nonzero eigenvector . Its corresponding eigenspace is
Write . The displayed matrix is the outer product , so
Its column space is contained in and is nonzero because . Hence is a rank-one matrix.
The vector is an eigenvector with eigenvalue , and every vector in the orthogonal complement has eigenvalue . Thus
Since is a direct sum of these eigenspaces, has an eigenbasis and is therefore a diagonalizable.
The rank of a matrix is the dimension of its column space, equivalently the dimension of the image of a linear map represented by the matrix. For , the rank-nullity theorem gives
An injective endomorphism of a finite-dimensional vector space is surjective, hence invertible. By the adjugate matrix identity
is invertible when ; conversely, multiplicativity of the determinant shows that an invertible has nonzero determinant. Therefore
Let be the matrix unit with its only nonzero entry at . The following matrices are all nonsingular:
Indeed, is an elementary shear when , while is diagonal with one diagonal entry equal to two. Their linear span contains every except initially , because , and it then contains
Thus spans the -dimensional space and, having members, is a basis. This also covers , when .
Now let be a nonsingular zero-one matrix. If it had fewer than zero entries, at least two rows would contain no zero at all. Those two rows would both be the all-one row, contradicting linear independence. Hence every such matrix has at most
ones. The bound is attained. Let be the all-one matrix and set
where there are initial diagonal ones. If and , the first row equations give , while the last gives . Hence every , so is nonsingular and has exactly ones. Therefore
Because has full column rank, is invertible. The ordinary least squares estimator is
It satisfies the normal equations
so the residual is orthogonal to the column space of . For any ,
The two terms are orthogonal, and the Pythagorean theorem in an inner-product space gives
Thus minimizes the least-squares objective.