Contents
1. Method
2. Geometric meaning
Method
The Gauss-Seidel method is a numerical method for solving a system of linear equations, which is an extension of the Gauss-Jacobi method.
Alternatively, we can also define
Geometric meaning
The definition simply states that, given a linear combination of two elements of , the resulting vector is also in
. This definition relates to lines and planes in
and
. To see why this is true, we consider two cases. The first is that
and
are scalar multiples of each other, say
. Then, we have
Which is simply a constant times a vector, which is the equation of a straight line in and
. Now, if the two vectors are not scalar multiples of each other, then we have the equation of a plane, which applies in both
and
. To see this, imagine we were to fix
in
, then we have the equation of a line that intersects the point
for all
. I.e, we end up with a line for which each point on said line is a point on another line, with the equation of the line intersecting the first line at each point having the same gradient vector.