Past exam of the mathematics course of the year 2 of the natural sciences course of the University of Cambridge / 2019 / Paper 1 / 6 / b

A real symmetric matrix has a real orthonormal eigenbasis. Put those eigenvectors into an orthogonal matrix $Q$, so $Q^{T}AQ=\mathrm{diag}(a_1,\dots ,a_n)$. With the change of coordinates $x=Q{x}^{\prime }$, or $x^{\prime }=Q^{T}x$,Thus the coefficients are the eigenvalues and the new coordinate directions are the eigenvectors. This orthogonal diagonalization preserves Euclidean lengths and angles while removing cross terms from the quadratic form.