Problem with Singular Value Decomposition Algorithm

Peter Schmitteckert support@schmitteckert.com
Wed Dec 19 13:20:00 GMT 2001


Dear All,

please excuse me, I have used gsl only once and havn't read the documents,
but I got curious by the follwing comment:

On Thursday 13 September 2001 22:33, Brian Gough wrote:

> Yes, the right singular vectors are given by the columns of V. The
> third column is the appropriate one.
>

Isn't that counter-intuitive fo a C programmer ?
In the original post I found no hints on a desired
Fortran semantic for the memory layout.  But I would 
expect that the default semantics of a C matrix library is
C style, so eigen vectors / singular vectors should be in
the rows, otherwise they are not in a contiguous memory
block.

Best wishes
Peter

P.S: 
I just looked up the documentation:

> Matrices are stored in row-major order, meaning that each row of elements 
> forms a contiguous block in memory. This is the standard "C-language 
> ordering" of two-dimensional arrays. Note that FORTRAN stores arrays in 
> column-major order. The number of rows is size1. The range of valid 

therefore, returnning vectors in the coulmn should be considered
as a bug. Have I missed something ?
Note, that the documentation says: "The matrix Q contains the elements of Q 
in untransposed form".



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