Circulant matrix — where it appears
Also named here as discrete fourier transform — the same set of essays touches all of them, so they are one junction rather than several.
The matrix that is one row
A circulant of size 16 is sixteen numbers, has no zero entry anywhere, and hands over its entire spectrum in closed form — the discrete Fourier transform of its first column, exactly. An eigensolver spends a sweep of Jacobi rotations over 256 entries arriving at the same answer, and agrees to 1.2·10⁻¹⁵.
A limit the matrix never reaches
Szegő's theorem gives a Toeplitz family's condition number in closed form — ((1+ρ)/(1−ρ))², which is 81 at ρ = 0.8. The 8×8 section reaches 52% of it, the 128×128 reaches 98.9%, and none of them ever arrives. A statement about a family is not a statement about the matrix in front of you.
Named alongside it
The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.
Condition numberDiscrete fourier transformAsymptotic analysisEigenvaluesExact inverseFactorisationFast fourier transformMatrix structureResidualSymbolSzego theoremToeplitz matrix