403/503 – Extra credit problem

This problem is due April 30 at the beginning of lecture.

Write a program that receives as input a real symmetric matrix and some tolerance bound , and performs the basic method to generating (and printing) a sequence of matrices until a stage is reached where the entries below the diagonal  of are all in absolute value below . Once this happens, the program returns the diagonal entries of as approximations to the eigenvalues of . (Check on a couple of examples that these are indeed decent approximations, at least for of small size and reasonably small values of .)

Most Computer Algebra Systems already have implemented algorithms to find the decomposition of a matrix. Instead of using these pre-programmed algorithms, write your own.

(Turn in the code, plus the couple of examples. Comment your code, so it can be easily understood what you are doing along the way. I’m reasonably familiar with Maple, Mathlab, Sage, and most flavors of C. If you are going to use a different language, please let me know as soon as you can, to see whether it is something I’ll be able to verify or if a different language will be needed instead. Ideally, the user can choose the dimension of the input matrix.)

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