It is inevitable that at some point in life, every person who is at least a little bit into the realm of Science (or studying the effects of Cocaine and the like) wonders "What are those mysterious eigenvalues that keep popping up now and again in everything and anything that we see?". Well, so I decided to inculcate a coherent thought process about them by means of talking to my friends (Thanks Mark and Ariel) and also by means of putting down my random thoughts in the form of this blog!
OooKay now the following is for those who still wish to stay with this, eigenvalues were first encountered in a half-drowsy-half-"I don't give a rat's ass coz I know it all" state of mind in my undergrad Linear Algebra. All that was registered in my mind by the end of that semester was that in German, eigen meant proper and there existed something that looked like an equation of bunched up numbers that spat out these "proper" values and some other bunched up numbers associated with each of these super-special numbers. Now, as you have most likely realized, I knew absolutely nothing whatever they did and whatever the point of the whole exercise was except that sense really made sense!!! ( A nightmare for someone in my shoes). So, I asked around (in the ever elusive Math department of course) and got the following answer in a rather "Don't bother me, go get a life!" attitude in a very low frequency (coming from a female):
"Weell....I don't know what the big confusion is really. It is fairly straight forward that eigenvalues are those that are the solutions of the Characteristic equation and the eigenvectors are the solution vectors of the Characteristic equation that are associated with each eigenvalue....." (Me go: zzzzz.....yaaaaawn ....uh uh ya I get it zzzz...... )
So, once I have realized that asking around does not always help and simply naming stuff does not either, I decided to dig this damn thing up by myself (which I did not have to coz there happened to exist others who were also wondering about the same thing).
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1 comment:
I think I'm a bit disappointed. I was rather expecting to be enlightened, to learn the true deep mystical and philosophical nature of the eigenvalue (all math nonsense aside).
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