Eigenvalues and Eigenvectors in Science and Engineering Christy Deken

Eigenvectors and eigenvalues are very important in science and engineering. This report provides examples of the applications of eigenvalues and eigenvectors in everyday life. It will run through a few examples to demonstrate the importance of eigenvalues and eigenvectors in science. It then demonstrates how one can find eigenvectors and eigenvalues.

Eigenvectors and eigenvalues are used widely in science and engineering. They have many applications, particularly in physics. Consider rigid physical bodies. Rigid physical bodies have a preferred direction of rotation, about which they can rotate freely. For example, if someone were to throw a football it would rotate around its axis while flying prettily through the air. If someone were to hit the ball in the air, the ball would be likely to flop in a less simple way. Although this may seem like common sense, even rigid bodies with a more complicated shape will have preferred directions of rotation. These are called axes of inertia, and they are calculated by finding the eigenvectors of a matrix called the inertia tensor. The eigenvalues, also important, are called moments of inertia. A completely different application of eigenvectors and eigenvalues is that they can be used in a theory of systems in differential equations, such as with

equations that relate two different populations. We can think of one population as predators and one population as prey. If the two populations are related by: dx/dt = 2x - 3y dy/dt = x - 2y This is the same as a system of differential equations with components (x(t), y(t)): x(t)=A x, where A= 2 -3 . This population has an eigenvector, v1 = 3 . 1 -2 1 This eigenvector has a specific meaning. If the population of the prey is three times that of the predators, that will always be true, because if x(0) is proportional to the eigenvector, then x = x. Therefore, x(t)= x(0)et. The role of the eigenvalue associated with the eigenvector is since, A v1 = v1 , = 1. This tells us the growth rate of the differential equation. Could one use eigenvectors in measuring the importance of a web site? Imagine a site is important if other important web sites link to it. If x1 , x2 , . . . , xn are the importances of the n different web sites of the world, we would want the importance of each web site to be proportional to the sum of the importances of every web site that links to up to it. This system of equations could look like this: x1 = K(x345 + x67 + x34) x2 =K(x14 + x245 + x99) ....=..... where K is the constant of proportionality, and the right side of the equation is the sum of importances of all the sites that link to the web site on the left. Now

picture a huge (n x n) matrix A whose (i,j) entry is 1 if web site j links to web site and is 0 otherwise. This allows us to rewrite this as:
x 1 := K

i= 1

( a ij) x j
i=(1,..., n). This is an eigenvector and eigenvalue problem.

It shows that the vector we are looking for is an eigenvector of the matrix A. To find it we might find all of the eigenvectors of A, and use the one with all positive components. Once the eigenvector is found the most important web site is the one with the largest entry in that eigenvector. The google web search engine uses a variant of this idea to find the importance of a large number of web sites. Now, lets talk about how to find eigenvectors and eigenvalues. Suppose = 0. Finding the eigenvalues is now the same as finding nonzero vectors in the null space. We can do this if det(A)=0 but not otherwise. If we do not assume that = 0 then it is still the same as finding the null space, but it is the null space for the matrix: A - I. Here I stands for the (n x n) identity matrix. There will be a nonzero vector for the identity matrix only if the determinate of this new matrix is equal to 0. We refer to this condition, det(A - I) = 0, as the characteristic equation of A. If the null space of A - I has a nonzero vector, it is called an eigenspace of A with an eigenvalue of . Thus the algorithm for solving for eigenvalues and eigenvectors, according to Evans M. Harrell II, is as follows: I. First find the eigenvalues by solving the characteristic equation. Call the solutions 1 , . . . , n .

II. For each eigenvalue k, use row reduction to find a basis of the eigenspace Ker(A - I). If k, the existence of a nonzero vector in this null space, is guaranteed. Any such vector is an eigenvector. There are many uses of eigenvectors and eigenvalues not discussed in this paper. This paper only begins to explore the many applications of eigenvectors and eigenvalues. However, the importance of these has been demonstrated in the examples discussed.

References 1. Evans M. Harrall II, Eigenvectors and Eigenvalues, (2001). Online at http://www.mathphysics.com/calc/eigen.html. 2. Herbert S. Wilf, University of Pennsylvania, (April 2001) . Online at http://www.math.utsc.utoronto.ca/b24/KendallWei.pdf.