Orthonormal basis

In mathematics, particularly linear algebra,

an orthonormal basis for an inner product
space V with finite dimension is a basis for
whose vectors are orthonormal, that is,
they are all unit vectors and orthogonal to
each other.[1][2][3] For example, the
standard basis for a Euclidean space
is an orthonormal basis, where the
relevant inner product is the dot product of
vectors. The image of the standard basis
under a rotation or reflection (or any
orthogonal transformation) is also
orthonormal, and every orthonormal basis
for arises in this fashion.

For a general inner product space an

orthonormal basis can be used to define
normalized orthogonal coordinates on
Under these coordinates, the inner product
becomes a dot product of vectors. Thus
the presence of an orthonormal basis
reduces the study of a finite-dimensional
inner product space to the study of
under dot product. Every finite-dimensional
inner product space has an orthonormal
basis, which may be obtained from an
arbitrary basis using the Gram–Schmidt
process.

In functional analysis, the concept of an

orthonormal basis can be generalized to
arbitrary (infinite-dimensional) inner
product spaces.[4] Given a pre-Hilbert
space an orthonormal basis for is
an orthonormal set of vectors with the
property that every vector in can be
written as an infinite linear combination of
the vectors in the basis. In this case, the
orthonormal basis is sometimes called a
Hilbert basis for Note that an
orthonormal basis in this sense is not
generally a Hamel basis, since infinite
linear combinations are required.[5]
Specifically, the linear span of the basis
must be dense in but it may not be the
entire space.

If we go on to Hilbert spaces, a non-

orthonormal set of vectors having the
same linear span as an orthonormal basis
may not be a basis at all. For instance, any
square-integrable function on the interval
can be expressed (almost
everywhere) as an infinite sum of
Legendre polynomials (an orthonormal
basis), but not necessarily as an infinite
sum of the monomials
A different generalisation is to pseudo-
inner product spaces, finite-dimensional
vector spaces equipped with a non-
degenerate symmetric bilinear form
known as the metric tensor. In such a
basis, the metric takes the form
with
positive ones and negative ones.

Examples

For , the set of vectors

is called the standard basis and forms

an orthonormal basis of with
respect to the standard dot product.
Note that both the standard basis and
standard dot product rely on viewing
as the Cartesian product
Proof: A straightforward computation
shows that the inner products of
these vectors equals zero,

and that each of their magnitudes

equals one,
This
means that is an
orthonormal set. All vectors
can be expressed as
a sum of the basis vectors scaled
 so spans and hence
must be a basis. It may also be shown
that the standard basis rotated about
an axis through the origin or reflected
in a plane through the origin also
forms an orthonormal basis of .

For , the standard basis and inner

product are similarly defined. Any other
orthonormal basis is related to the
standard basis by an orthogonal
transformation in the group O(n).
For pseudo-Euclidean space , an
orthogonal basis with metric
instead satisfies if
, if ,
and if
. Any two
orthonormal bases are related by a
pseudo-orthogonal transformation. In
the case , these are
Lorentz transformations.
The set with
where
denotes the exponential function, forms
an orthonormal basis of the space of
functions with finite Lebesgue integrals,
with respect to the 2-norm.
This is fundamental to the study of
Fourier series.
 The set with if
and otherwise forms
an orthonormal basis of
Eigenfunctions of a Sturm–Liouville
eigenproblem.
The column vectors of an orthogonal
matrix form an orthonormal set.

Basic formula

If is an orthogonal basis of then

every element may be written as

When is orthonormal, this simplifies to

and the square of the norm of can be
given by

Even if is uncountable, only countably

many terms in this sum will be non-zero,
and the expression is therefore well-
defined. This sum is also called the Fourier
expansion of and the formula is usually
known as Parseval's identity.

If is an orthonormal basis of then

is isomorphic to in the following
sense: there exists a bijective linear map
such that

Incomplete orthogonal sets

Given a Hilbert space and a set of

mutually orthogonal vectors in we can
take the smallest closed linear subspace
of containing Then will be an
orthogonal basis of which may of
course be smaller than itself, being an
incomplete orthogonal set, or be when
it is a complete orthogonal set.

Existence