Adjoint in weighted coordinates Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-10-31
Suppose a linear map between finite-dimensional Hilbert spaces has matrix , and their inner products in the chosen bases are and . The Gram matrices are positive-definite matrices. Writing for the ordinary conjugate transpose, the coordinate matrix of the adjoint operator is
Indeed, the defining inner product identity says for all . Thus simply transposing and conjugating is valid in orthonormal bases, where both Gram matrices are the identity matrix.
For the weighted inner product and the coordinate swap , the adjoint operator has matrix . With and , both inner products equal . The coordinate swap is its own ordinary transpose, but is not self-adjoint in this weighted inner product.
In the crystallographic convention, a Coxeter graph is admissible when it is realized by linearly independent unit vectors in a Euclidean space, with nonpositive mutual inner products and for distinct vertices. The number records a single, double or triple connection; equivalently, the displayed Gram matrix is positive-definite. In edge-label notation the nonzero connections have labels . Forgetting multiplicity, the underlying graph is a forest: for any cycle of distinct vertices, the sum of the corresponding unit vectors would have squared norm at most , contradicting their linear independence. Multiple lines on one connection are labels and are not length-two cycles. This is the convention of Wehler's Lie algebra notes, section 6.3.
Consider the squared error of approximating , , by a polynomial under a measure containing on . This error is finite exactly when . A nonzero constant term makes the integrand asymptotic to , which is not Lebesgue integrable; a vanishing constant term makes , giving an integrable integrand.
Consequently the full space of polynomials of degree at most is not contained in the weighted L2 space. Its admissible subspace is , or zero when . This finite-dimensional subspace has a unique orthogonal projection of , hence a unique best approximation. Indeed its Gram matrix is positive definite: a nonzero polynomial cannot vanish on an interval, so its squared norm is positive. Thus a singular weight can invalidate the proposed full approximation space while still allowing a unique finite-error minimizer in its admissible part. As usual, weighted L2 spaces identify functions equal almost everywhere.
Basis matrix 2026-10-25
A matrix whose columns are the coordinate vectors of an ordered basis in a fixed reference basis. It is an invertible matrix, and multiplication by it converts coordinates in the column basis to the reference coordinates: . For a real inner product space with orthonormal reference basis, its Gram matrix is , and its reciprocal basis has basis matrix .
Keep the same origin and the same vector , but use the nonperpendicular basis vectors and . They form a basis because the column matrix has nonzero determinant:
The reconstruction is . Its coordinates are read along lines parallel to the other axis, producing a parallelogram. These lines need not be perpendicular to the axis being measured. In contrast, the dot products are and ; treating those as coordinates would reconstruct , a different vector.
Figure 1.
The same vector reconstructed in an oblique basis: coordinates differ from dot products
. Details.
The dual basis supplies the right measuring rules for any basis.[ref] Here these coordinate functionals are and , the rows of . They give . Equivalently, their representing vectors , satisfy and extract the coordinates as . These are Riesz dual basis in an inner product space representatives, rather than the original basis vectors.
The Gram matrix records how the nonperpendicular directions interact:
For any real basis represented by a square invertible matrix , writing gives these identities immediately. One can recover the coordinates either as or by solving . In this example, if , the squared norm is , not . Oblique coordinates remain useful when natural directions are not perpendicular, but the Gram matrix must accompany them when computing lengths or dot products.
Use the standard polytabloids for tableaux with rows and , as an ordered basis . Adjacent transpositions act by
In characteristic three their common fixed line is . On its quotient every transposition acts by minus one, giving the sign representation. Thus the displayed sequence has the trivial representation and sign as its composition factors, each once. It is nonsplit: the minus-one eigenspace of is , which is not preserved by .
The natural tabloid form restricts to Gram matrix . Its radical in characteristic three is exactly that fixed line. Therefore is the sign quotient, while the trivial factor is . This gives an explicit small failure of semisimplicity in modular symmetric-group representation theory.
André-Louis Cholesky developed his calculation in the setting of geodetic adjustment: measured angles and lengths must satisfy geometric relations, while corrections should be small. The manuscript reproduced in Claude Brezinski's study is titled Sur la résolution numérique des systèmes d’équations linéaires and ends with the date 2 December 1910 at Vincennes. The manuscript reports a 56-equation calculation adjusting altitudes in an Algerian triangulation network. Its date establishes when this written account existed, rather than an exact invention date.[ref]
A related algebraic reason for the method's usefulness is that normal equations involve a Gram matrix. If a real matrix has linearly independent columns, then
so is a positive-definite matrix. That gives the structure needed by a Cholesky decomposition. The historical adjustment problem instead produces from independent constraint rows; the same argument applies to its transpose. In numerical least squares, explicitly forming normal equations squares the condition number of a full-column-rank design matrix; a QR decomposition can therefore be preferable for accuracy. Indeed, the extreme singular values give . The factorization remains useful when a positive-definite matrix is already the natural input.
For a symmetric zero-diagonal dissimilarity matrix , square each entry to obtain and put . Take the eigenvectors of corresponding to its largest positive eigenvalues. Multiplying them by square roots of these eigenvalues gives coordinates. If contains Euclidean distances, is a centered Gram matrix, so retaining all positive eigenvalues reconstructs those distances exactly. Retaining fewer approximates the Gram matrix, not generally the sum of squared errors in raw distances. Negative eigenvalues signal failure of an exact Euclidean representation. Coordinates are unchanged in meaning by orthogonal transformations.
For a matrix with at least two columns of unit Euclidean norm, its mutual coherence is the largest magnitude of an inner product between distinct columns. It measures the strongest pairwise ambiguity of linear measurements. The Cauchy-Schwarz inequality gives . The order-two restricted isometry constant equals the mutual coherence, because every two-column Gram matrix has eigenvalues .
Complement theta number Created 2026-10-05 Updated 2026-10-14
For a finite simple graph with at least one vertex, the complement theta number has the equivalent semidefinite program formulations
and
The Schur complement and prove the equivalence; any feasible is at least one, so division by is valid. For a graph with an edge, is the Gram matrix of a strict vector coloring. Consequently is the strict vector chromatic number, and an ordinary -graph colouring gives by assigning the colors the vertices of a regular simplex.
Constant-intersection family bound Created 2026-10-06 Updated 2026-10-07
If distinct members of a set family on have intersection size , then its size is at most for , and at most for , assuming . In the positive case, use the Gram matrix of the characteristic vectors of sets; a member of size is handled by disjoint remainders. In the zero case nonempty members are disjoint.
Coxeter Gram matrix Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-09-24
The Coxeter Gram matrix is the Gram matrix of the distinguished basis in the Geometric representation of a Coxeter group.
For normalized columns and , the restricted isometry constant is bounded by the cumulative coherence at . A restricted Gram matrix has diagonal one and every off-diagonal row sum at most . The Gershgorin circle theorem and the finite-dimensional spectral theorem bound its eigenvalues between and . At the distortion is zero, and at it is exactly the mutual coherence.
Decoupled coefficients of orthogonal polynomial projections Created 2026-10-18 Updated 2026-10-20
Let be a real function with , and let be the vector space of real polynomials of degree at most . Its orthogonal projection is the least-squares polynomial in an orthogonal-polynomial basis
Each coefficient depends on just one weighted inner product with and one squared norm. In particular, the coefficients stay the same when the allowed polynomial degree increases. This statement assumes a fixed weight, interval and normalization of the orthogonal polynomials.
To see why the least-squares normal equations decouple, first write a trial polynomial as in any basis of . The residual must be orthogonal to each permitted direction, giving
The Gram matrix usually couples the unknown coefficients. With , it becomes , leaving the separate equations . For the monomial basis on with , by contrast, is zero when is odd and when is even. Distinct even powers, or distinct odd powers, remain coupled.
There is also a proof of the minimum that uses no differentiation. The defining coefficients give for . Thus is orthogonal to all of . For every , the Pythagorean theorem in an inner-product space gives
The second term is nonnegative and vanishes exactly when , proving that the least-squares solution is unique. This is an integrated squared-error optimum; it does not assert a smallest error at every point or a smallest uniform norm.
For , the nested orthogonal projections satisfy the exact residual budget
Indeed, is a linear combination of mutually orthogonal polynomials, and is orthogonal to it. Every newly retained component removes exactly from the squared error. No infinite expansion or completeness assumption is needed for this finite identity. The Legendre least-squares projections of a cubic make every term explicit.
Directed subspace angle Created 2026-10-07 Updated 2026-10-25
For a nonzero closed subspace of a Hilbert space and a closed subspace of a Hilbert space , this angle measures the worst loss under projection from to . Its positive cosine is a uniform lower bound for . The order of the subspaces matters in general. This is distinct from the smallest angle between two subspaces, whose cosine is a supremum. For equal finite dimensions the cosine is the smallest singular value of the cross Gram matrix of orthonormal bases. When is zero, the infimum is over an empty unit sphere and does not define an angle in ; use a lower-bound formulation instead.
If the weight vector lies in the linear span of the training feature map outputs, write . Then
This is a dual representation: coefficients weight training examples rather than feature coordinates. They need not be positive, and need not be unique when the kernel matrix is singular. Some kernel methods instead write with under their own optimization constraints.[ref] The formula is an algebraic conversion for a weight vector in this linear span, not a claim about every possible weight vector. The representer theorem gives a broader reason this form appears in regularized kernel methods.
For the XOR separation by a product feature, let have rows . The Gram matrix of those rows, equivalently the kernel matrix, is
Its eigenvalues are , so it is a positive semidefinite matrix of rank two, not an invertible matrix. More generally, for any real coefficient vector and any finite set of inputs,
This proves the positive-semidefinite kernel condition for the displayed polynomial kernel on all of , rather than checking only this square.
Here , so the explicit choice gives and . Consequently
For the new input , the four polynomial kernel evaluations are . Their weighted sum is , and the sign function predicts . No explicit feature map is needed for this calculation. These coefficients were constructed to reproduce the chosen separator; no fitting algorithm or generalization guarantee is being asserted.
Figure 1.
Quadratic kernel Gram matrix and a dual prediction for a new input
. Both panels use the same ordered four square corners. The Gram matrix has eigenvalues eight, eight, zero, zero. The new-input column contains four kernel evaluations, whose signed weighted contributions sum to minus one half. Details.
Elliptope 2026-10-06
The set of real positive semidefinite matrices with unit diagonal. Equivalently, its members are Gram matrices of unit vectors, by the real spectral theorem. Every two-by-two principal minor gives , so the set is bounded; it is also closed, hence compact in finite dimension. This gives attainment of linear objectives used in semidefinite programming.
With signed active covariate columns and their positive-definite Gram matrix , the displayed direction has unit norm and . Thus it makes equal angles with unit-length signed active covariates, and movement along it reduces their signed residual correlations at the common rate . The regression coefficient direction is , with inactive components zero.
Euclidean vector Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
A Euclidean vector is a vector in a finite-dimensional real inner product space. Choosing an orthonormal basis identifies it with its real vector components in . A geometric arrow represents a Euclidean vector by a length and a direction; translating the arrow without changing either represents the same Euclidean vector. The zero vector has length zero and no distinguished direction.[ref]
For points and in a Cartesian coordinate system, the displacement is . The arrow from to represents the same Euclidean vector, even though its endpoints differ. An endpoint is a position; their difference is a vector. In an orthonormal basis ,
The Euclidean norm comes from the inner product: . The sum of squared vector components is valid in an orthonormal basis; an arbitrary basis requires the appropriate Gram matrix. This distinction lets the geometric vector stay the same while its coordinate vector changes.[ref]
Vector addition is componentwise. With and ,
Geometrically, translate the second arrow so its tail starts at the first arrow's head. The vector sum joins the starting point to the final endpoint. Reversing the order gives the other route around the same parallelogram, so vector addition is commutative. This is the useful bookkeeping behind adding successive displacements, velocities, or forces: direction information survives the calculation. For a force, the Euclidean vector alone does not specify its point of application, which also affects the torque.[ref]
Figure 1.
Two orders of vector addition reach the same endpoint
. The original Euclidean vectors and form a parallelogram. Either head-to-tail route gives their vector sum ; dashed copies are translated arrows, not additional terms. Details.
The magnitude of a vector sum is generally different from the sum of the magnitudes. Here , whereas . The triangle inequality explains why the direct displacement cannot exceed the length of this two-segment route. A return displacement makes the net vector sum zero, although the lengths of the three travelled segments sum to a positive number.
The dot product exposes direction quantitatively: for nonzero Euclidean vectors, . For the displayed pair, the dot product is , so and the angle is . For orthogonal vectors, that dot product is zero. Dividing by magnitudes separates direction from size, which is the purpose of vector normalization.
First fundamental form Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-14
The first fundamental form of a smooth surface is the restriction of the ambient inner product to each tangent space . For a regular parametric surface , it is
Here means , not a componentwise square. The coefficients form the Gram matrix of the two coordinate tangent vectors. Regularity makes this a positive-definite matrix, so and .
To calculate the length of a curve , apply the chain rule and integrate its speed:
The same inner product gives the angle between nonzero tangent vectors through , and gives the area element as a positive density. One compact expression therefore supplies rulers, protractors, and surface area measurements.
For the lateral surface of a circular cylinder, take the circumferential arc length rather than the angle:
Direct inner products give , hence . This is exactly the Euclidean metric on the unrolled plane. For instance, a path with , , has length on either surface. Every corresponding path retains its length, not merely this example, so sufficiently small neighborhoods retain their intrinsic distances. The local isometry preserves angles and surface areas too. Globally is periodic with period : unrolling requires a seam, and the whole circular cylinder is not a single planar manifold chart.