Orthogonal projections

Def: Let and be subspaces of an inner product space V.

(1) Two subspaces and are said to be orthogonal, written
, if =0 for each u and w .
(2) The set of all vectors in V that are orthogonal to every vector in
is called the orthogonal complement of , denoted by , i.e.,
= {v : = 0 for all u }.
(read “ -perp”)
 Thm 5.13: (Properties of orthogonal subspaces)
Let W be a subspace of V and dim(V)=n. Then the
following properties are true.
(1) dim(W )  dim(W  )  n
(2)
(3) (W  )   W

 Notes:

(1) 0  V (2) V   0

Orthogonal Projection:
Let be a subspace of an inner product space , and let
{ } be an orthonormal basis for . The orthogonal
projection from onto the subspace is defined by

for any
 Ex 5: (Projection onto a subspace)
w1  0, 3, 1, w 2  2, 0, 0, v  1, 1, 3
Find the projection of the vector v onto the subspace W.
W  span({w1 , w 2 })
Sol:
w1 , w 2  : an orthogonal basis for W
 w1 w 2   3 1 
 u1 , u 2    ,   (0, , ), 1,0,0  :
 w1 w 2   10 10 
an orthonormal basis for W
projW v   v , u1  u1   v , u2  u2
6 3 1 9 3
 (0, , )  1,0,0   (1, , )
10 10 10 5 5
 Thm: (Orthogonal projection and distance)
Let U be a subspace of an inner product space V, and x .
Then for all ,

The equality holds if and only if