Concept

Certificate — where it appears

An object that proves a claim and can be checked without repeating the computation that produced it.

Named by 2 essays across 2 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

Also named here as negative curvature — the same set of essays touches all of them, so they are one junction rather than several.

significand bits10³10⁴10⁵10⁶10⁷10⁸10⁹10¹⁰κ(A)87892634456329625911109435761199127514162024every matrix positive definiteruns producing a false certificate14of runs in total72never above, in significand bits12first κ at eight bits10⁵the comparison was correctand what it proved was not true

Deciding that a zero has arrived

The previous tolerances were offers — accept this much error, save this much work. A detection threshold is not an offer, because both directions are failures. One matrix here has three genuinely near-invariant subspaces, and the constant somebody typed decides which of them the recurrence stops at; at eight significand bits the same kind of constant produces a proof of something false.

error · deliberate zero
012345678-7-5-3-11357conjugate gradient steppᵀAp ⁄ pᵀpλ_min = -0.1positive: a step existsnegative: a certificate existsone matrix, two questionsstep it turns at6quotient there-0.027share of λ_min recovered0.27λ_min, by construction-0.1MINRES steps on the same system37the division that cannot be doneis the answer to a different question

The division that cannot be done

Conjugate gradients divides by pᵀAp at every step, and on a matrix that is not positive definite that number can be zero or negative. This site has guarded against it since its first commit and described it as a failure. In the method that made conjugate gradients famous it is the single most valuable object the iteration can produce, and it costs six matrix–vector products.

iterative · breakdown

Named alongside it

The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.

Krylov subspaceNegative curvatureBackward errorCholeskyConjugate gradientsCounterexampleEigenvaluesHalf precisionIndefinite matrixInfinite eigenvalueInvariant subspaceMachine epsilon

All concepts