Fun with Matrices

I’ll let the code speak for itself:

In [81]: m = Matrix(array([[1.0,1.0],[0.0,1.0]]))
 
In [82]: def my_sqrt(x, num_iters):
   ....:     r = 0.5*x
   ....:     for i in xrange(num_iters):
   ....:             r = 0.5*(r+x/r)
   ....:     return r
   ....:
 
In [83]: m*m
Out[83]:
array([[ 1.,  2.],
       [ 0.,  1.]])
 
In [84]: my_sqrt(m*m, 10)
Out[84]:
array([[ 1.,  1.],
       [ 0.,  1.]])
 
In [85]: m
Out[85]:
array([[ 1.,  1.],
       [ 0.,  1.]])

It’s always fun to see the math work out. At first when I learned that e^A for a matrix A may also be defined using the Taylor series in the usual way, I was really amazed. It still amazes me that this stuff works out so well. This is another kind of beauty.

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