Week 8 Linear systems Midterm

Structured and fast solvers

Reading: Golub & Van Loan §4.5, 4.7–4.8, pp. 196–233.

By the end of this week you should be able to

  • Solve a block tridiagonal system by block elimination.
  • Recognise Toeplitz and circulant structure and exploit it.
  • Diagonalize a circulant matrix with the DFT and solve in O(n log n).

Algorithms introduced

  • Block tridiagonal elimination
  • Classical Toeplitz methods
  • FFT-based circulant and discrete Poisson solvers

Where this shows up in AI

A convolution is a circulant matrix. The same structure that makes convolution cheap in a CNN makes these systems fast to solve.

Materials