For
the gradient is . The steepest descent method with exact line search for a positive-definite quadratic therefore uses
For and , the minimizer is . Put
Starting from , direct substitution gives and, inductively,
The Euclidean norm is unchanged by the alternating sign, so
For a positive-definite matrix, the spectral condition number of a positive-definite matrix is
Here , and hence
The Conjugate gradient method starts with and updates
By finite termination of the conjugate gradient method, it reaches the exact solution in at most the number of distinct eigenvalues. This matrix has two, so at most
are required in exact arithmetic.
The exact line search for a positive-definite quadratic gives
Using
produces the stated ratio formula. If and are the extreme eigenvalues,
Hence the fraction in the ratio is at least , and iteration yields
When , , so the right side is zero after one iteration: exact line search reaches the solution in a single step.