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Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America logoLink to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
. 1985 Apr;82(8):2197–2201. doi: 10.1073/pnas.82.8.2197

Solution of the embedding problem and decomposition of symmetric matrices.

M J Sippl, H A Scheraga
PMCID: PMC397523  PMID: 3857574

Abstract

A solution of the problem of calculating cartesian coordinates from a matrix of interpoint distances (the embedding problem) is reported. An efficient and numerically stable algorithm for the transformation of distances to coordinates is then obtained. It is shown that the embedding problem is intimately related to the theory of symmetric matrices, since every symmetric matrix is related to a general distance matrix by a one-to-one transformation. Embedding of a distance matrix yields a decomposition of the associated symmetric matrix in the form of a sum over outer products of a linear independent system of coordinate vectors. It is shown that such a decomposition exists for every symmetric matrix and that it is numerically stable. From this decomposition, the rank and the numbers of positive, negative, and zero eigenvalues of the symmetric matrix are obtained directly.

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Selected References

These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.

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