I came across the proof of Perron Frobenius theorem here and it used Banach fixed point theorem. So I spent some time to understand the fixed point theorem from the wiki.
Theorem
Banach fixed point theorem considers a complete metric space (with metric ) and for any contraction mapping , there will exist a unique fixed point. That is .
By contraction mapping, we mean that for some .
Proof
The main idea of the proof is to simply realize that the sequence is a Cauchy sequence. And since the space is complete and so will converge to the fixed point.
To show the sequence is Cauchy, note that
Consequently,
Since is finite and , for any , we have for sufficiently large Thus, the sequence is Cauchy and converges to the fixed point.
Now, the fixed point has to be unique, otherwise, say we have two fixed points ,
. Since , this leads to contradiction.
Prologue
Btw, as for my original motivation, Knill’s proof were very neat if it doesn’t seem to have a hole. It claims that is a vector with length smaller than , where is the length of . Unfortunately, one can easily verify with octave or matlab that it is not true in general. is possible unless is symmetric.
Update: I went back and forth as I got rusty with the matrix “expansion” result. Indeed we have something like
but is the singular value instead of the eigenvalue. Because if , , the vector length will scale the maximum when is proportional to the left singular vector of the maximum singular value. Of course, singular value is just the same as eigenvalue when a matrix is symmetric. So unfortunately, the proof still appears to have a hole.