Earll,

> I apologize this is not directly Deal.ii related, but I wanted to share it in 
> case it contains something enlightening for deal.ii developers.
> 
> A friend of mine in the physics community shared this article:
 > [...]
> 
> My knowledge of eigenvector and eigenvalue calculation is very rusty, but I 
> understand they are claiming to have simplified eigenvector calculation under 
> certain conditions. Does anyone know what this means in a practical sense? Is 
> this clickbait? Does anyone understand this article well enough to say if it 
> has computational implications outside quantum mechanics?

I'm no eigenvalue expert either, but it's an interesting formula. In general, 
if Terence Tao speaks, it's worth listening :-)

As for practical impact, I think this comment is useful:
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2019/08/13/eigenvectors-from-eigenvalues/#comment-529043

But at least as far as the community on this mailing list is concerned, it's 
worth keeping in mind two issues:

* The matrices we have are sparse; that makes a lot of things more 
complicated, but also some much easier.

* The matrices for which we consider eigenvalues are generally 
finite-dimensional approximations of infinite-dimensional operators. That 
means that in general only the matrix eigenvalues at either the low or the 
high end of the spectrum are good approximations of the operator eigenvalues, 
and those are the ones we're generally interested in. In other words, we 
almost never compute all eigenvalues of a matrix because most of them are 
meaningless. So we only care about a few eigenvalues and corresponding 
eigenvectors (and have efficient Krylov space methods to compute them) -- but 
then a formula that requires us to know *all* eigenvalues of a matrix (plus 
all eigenvalues of all of the M matrices) is not going to be of great help to 
our community.

Best
  W.

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wolfgang Bangerth          email:                 [email protected]
                            www: http://www.math.colostate.edu/~bangerth/

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