Kac collision operator 2026-10-06
For , uses the genuine two-coordinate rotation . Average it uniformly over angles and pairs to obtain . Rotation invariance of Lebesgue measure makes a bounded self-adjoint operator of norm one on . Each pair average is an orthogonal projection, but their full average is not in general a projection.
Kahane-Khintchine inequality 2026-10-06
For a Rademacher sum in a normed vector space, any two fixed positive moments of its norm are comparable with constants depending only on those moments. The sharp Rademacher second-moment inequality gives the sharp first-to-second moment comparison for arbitrary coefficients.
Kaplansky density theorem 2026-10-14
For a unital star-subalgebra , its unit ball is dense in the unit ball of in the strong operator topology. The same holds for self-adjoint unit balls and for positive unit balls, and the full unit balls may be approximated strongly together with their adjoints. Passing first to the norm closure allows continuous functional calculus; resolvent identities prove strong continuity of continuous functions vanishing at infinity, even for unbounded approximating nets of self-adjoint operators. A cutoff function supplies the norm bound, and a two-by-two self-adjoint matrix removes the self-adjoint restriction.
Kernel of a seminorm 2026-10-14
The kernel of a seminorm is its zero set, a linear subspace by absolute homogeneity and the triangle inequality. The estimate shows that adding an element of does not change . Hence defines a norm on the quotient vector space .
On itself, is a pseudometric; it is a metric exactly when is a norm. In particular, zero distance in one pseudometric need not mean equality of vectors. A separating family of seminorms removes the common zero-distance ambiguity.
L0 sparsity count 2026-10-07
The number of nonzero coordinates of a finite vector is its L0 sparsity count. It vanishes only at zero, but is unchanged under multiplication by a nonzero scalar, so it is not a norm. Minimizing it under linear measurement constraints finds a sparse vector with the smallest possible support of a vector. Sparse injectivity of order guarantees unique recovery of every sparse vector with at most nonzero coordinates by this objective.
L2 inner product Created 2026-10-05 Updated 2026-10-07
The L2 inner product is the inner product on L2 space. Its induced norm is the L2 norm, and the mass matrix represents it in a finite element basis.
Labelled hypergraph copy count 2026-10-14
For hypergraphs , a labelled copy is an injective function taking every hypergraph edge of to an hypergraph edge of . Specified vertex of a hypergraph classes may additionally require . The count is the sum, over these injective maps, of the product of the host hypergraph edge indicators. Without injectivity the same expression counts hypergraph homomorphisms. On a common host of size , their counts differ by at most : every noninjective map identifies at least one pair of abstract vertices of a hypergraph, each prescribed equality permits at most maps, and the union bound completes the estimate. An induced copy additionally preserves nonedges, so its indicator product includes nonedge factors. The counting lemma for octahedrally quasirandom three-uniform hypergraphs estimates these labelled products when the requisite centered triple indicators have small box norm.
Lasso support bound from sparse eigenvalues 2026-10-05
For and , use the Lasso objective . Suppose the noise score has maximum norm at most , the true support has size , and . For any nonempty , the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions implyThe upper bound is the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality. Hence . A finite first index violating this inequality must exceed . Its minimality also gives . If no such index exists within , use the always defined bound .
Lebesgue constant of interpolation 2026-10-14
If interpolation at distinct sites in a finite-dimensional space of continuous functions is unique, its cardinal functions satisfy . The interpolation linear map is and has operator norm in the supremum norm. The upper bound is the triangle inequality. For the reverse bound choose node values to be the signs of the cardinal functions at a point maximizing their absolute sum, and extend those values by a continuous function of norm one. The polynomial reproduction error bound gives .
Length of a curve Created 2026-10-05 Updated 2026-10-14
The length of a piecewise smooth curve is its arc length: , using either the Euclidean space norm or the norm from a specified Riemannian metric. A straight segment from to in Euclidean space has length , while a route that bends or retraces can be longer. On a Riemannian manifold, comparing these lengths over all routes defines Riemannian distance.
Linear span Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-14
The linear span of a subset of a vector space is the set of all finite linear combinations of elements of . It is the smallest vector subspace containing : every vector subspace containing the original vectors must contain their sums and scalar multiples.
In , the linear span of is a line, the linear span of is the plane , and adding gives all of . Adding to the first set changes none of its attainable vectors, because it is already a scalar multiple of . Thus a spanning set can contain redundant generators; linear independence identifies when this redundancy is absent. In an infinite-dimensional space, an algebraic linear span still uses finite sums; a closed linear span can also include limits in a specified norm.
L-infinity norm 2026-10-14
On a measure space of positive total measure, the L-infinity norm of an essentially bounded measurable function is . The absolute value matters: a constant function has L-infinity norm three, even though its essential supremum is . The norm belongs to the equivalence class in Lp space; different representatives equal almost everywhere give the same answer. [ref]
Lp spaces (Chapter 7 of Measure Theory). Hunter, Measure Theory, Definition 7.4: the L-infinity norm
.For the function in essential infimum and essential supremum, under Lebesgue measure, whereas its supremum norm is four. Replacing the exceptional values by the ordinary values leaves every finite Lp norm unchanged as well: . This tends to one as . That agreement explains why the endpoint with exponent uses an essential bound rather than a pointwise bound.
A finite probability space makes the distinction between zero and small measure explicit. Let , , and . Assign weights , , , where . For ,When , the singleton is a null set and . For every , however small, . For example, gives and , yet the large- Lp norms approach ten. The ordinary pointwise supremum norm is ten in both cases.
A zero-weight value disappears from every Lp norm, while a rare positive-weight value determines the limiting L-infinity norm
. The original three-point example has values . The curves use weights and , respectively. Dashed levels show the limiting norms three and ten; the plotted finite exponents do not themselves reach those limits. Details.Why can a rare value dominate? For a bounded function on a probability space, an almost everywhere bound gives . If , the set has positive probability, so . As , the factor tends to one. These two bounds squeeze the limit to . The probability measure assumption keeps total measure finite; this explanation does not assert the same finite- integrability on arbitrary infinite-measure spaces.
Locally square-integrable function Created 2026-10-06 Updated 2026-10-14
A measurable function belongs to when its squared absolute value has finite integral on every compact subset of . Functions are identified if they agree almost everywhere. This is a local integrability condition, not a specified global Hilbert space norm. For example, belongs to but its mean-square averages on expanding intervals diverge.
For and , existence follows from finite-dimensional compactness and uniqueness from strictly convex normed space geometry. Translation by and negative translation by preserve the target and the error norm. Uniqueness forces the minimizing trigonometric polynomial to be invariant under the first operation and the negative of itself under the second. Invariance removes every nonzero frequency below ; negative invariance removes the remaining constant.
Low-rank approximation 2026-10-14
A low-rank approximation replaces an matrix by a matrix of matrix rank at most a chosen integer , with , while making an explicitly chosen error norm small. The point is to describe many entries using a few shared patterns: an image compression may retain broad brightness patterns while discarding finer ones. The approximation is useful when the saved storage or computation justifies the lost detail. A small matrix rank alone says nothing about the error.
The compact representation is a sum of outer products, equivalently a product of two thin matrices:Here are the columns of , and the star denotes the conjugate transpose; over the real numbers use the transpose. The rank bound for a matrix product gives . Conversely, choose a basis of the column space of as the columns of , and put the coordinates of each column of into ; pad with zero columns if the matrix rank is smaller than . Each nonzero outer product is a rank-one matrix: it repeats a single column pattern at different strengths across the columns.
Keeping the two factors stores scalars instead of . This saves space only when . The usual singular value decomposition representation stores scalars because it keeps the singular values separately; absorbing them into one factor removes that extra array. These are representation sizes at equal scalar precision, before file overhead. See Uschmajew and Vandereycken, §9.2: thin factors and their storage, and Illinois CS 357, Low-rank approximation: storing singular vectors and values.
The factors also give without forming the full matrix . Direct evaluation uses scalar multiplications, compared with for a dense matrix applied to a vector. For , the two factors contain scalars rather than , and the same counts describe these multiplication costs. Constructing the factors is a separate cost. Moreover, a low-rank approximation need not be a sparse matrix: the constant matrix whose entries are all has matrix rank despite having no zero entries.
For the standard unweighted problem, write a singular value decomposition with and singular values . Retain the first paired left singular vectors and right singular vectors:The Eckart-Young-Mirsky theorem says that this same minimizes both of the following error norms over all matrices with matrix rank at most :where and an empty sum is zero. Here the Frobenius norm is , whereas the operator norm is specifically induced by the Euclidean norm, . The first aggregates errors in all entries; the second bounds the worst output error for a unit vector input. These formulas apply to real and complex matrices. [ref]
https://math.uchicago.edu/~may/REU2016/REUPapers/Mazeika.pdf. Mazeika, §§4.1 and 4.3: norms and optimal singular-value truncation
For , a relative Frobenius norm tolerance is met precisely when the discarded squared singular values sum to at most . Thus one can choose the smallest suitable before reconstructing the matrix. Many individually small discarded singular values can still have a large combined error. An operator norm tolerance instead tests only the largest discarded singular value, . The two questions can therefore select different ranks.
The following stipulated matrix makes the tradeoff visible. Define four real vectors of length :The vectors are orthonormal, so this is already a singular value decomposition written as outer products, with positive singular values . All entries lie between and and can be displayed as brightnesses. The first component is uniform brightness, the second distinguishes broad blocks, and the last two supply finer alternating patterns. This is a designed arithmetic example, not measured image data.
Here has every entry equal to , while has entries within the two diagonal blocks and in the other two blocks. For instance, becomes : its error is . The full residual is , whose Frobenius norm is and whose operator norm is . Since , the relative Frobenius norm error is . Two thin factors use scalars, or if the normalized left singular vectors, right singular vectors, and singular values are stored separately, instead of dense entries.
Retaining three components reduces the Frobenius norm error to while using scalars in two factors. Retaining all four reconstructs exactly but uses scalars, giving no saving in this generic representation; keeping the singular values separately uses . Our particular sign patterns could be encoded more economically, but that would exploit an additional structure beyond the general low-rank approximation. The striking feature is that numerical error and storage can both be read from the decomposition, rather than judged only by how smooth the picture looks.
The constraint is deliberately matrix rank at most . The truncation has . If , the best approximation is itself, with zero error. Requiring matrix rank exactly can destroy attainment: for and , the matrices have matrix rank for , and both error norms equal . Their error has infimum zero, but no rank-two matrix attains it. If , the displayed does have matrix rank exactly and attains the same minimum under either constraint.
Optimality also does not always mean uniqueness. For , the best Frobenius norm approximation is unique when . [ref]
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-31351-7_9. Uschmajew and Vandereycken, Theorem 9.1: uniqueness across a singular-value gap
A positive tie across the cutoff permits different choices: for and , both and have Frobenius norm error and operator norm error . More generally, is optimal for every real unit vector in the first two coordinate directions. Rotating which tied direction is kept changes the approximation. Repeated singular values entirely inside the retained group do not change its sum of outer products. At the only feasible matrix is zero; at the unique zero-error approximation is , even if some singular values are tied at zero.A strict gap does not guarantee uniqueness for the operator norm. For and , every with has matrix rank and error , which is optimal. Only minimizes the Frobenius norm, since . An unchanged worst direction can hide extra error in another direction under the operator norm.
Finally, these guarantees concern the stated norms and the sole matrix rank constraint. They do not establish that a discarded pattern is noise or irrelevant to a particular task: the finer patterns in our constructed example were put there intentionally. Adding entrywise weights or restrictions on the factors changes the problem, so the Eckart-Young-Mirsky theorem above does not automatically solve it. For historical context, the original 1936 matrix problem is documented in the existing Eckart-Young-Mirsky theorem section.


