Banach fixed point theorem

 

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 d) and for any contraction mapping T, there will exist a unique fixed point. That is T(x)=x.

By contraction mapping, we mean that d(T(x),T(y))\le q d(x,y) for some q \in [0,1).

Proof

The main idea of the proof is to simply realize that the sequence x_0, x_1=T(x_0), x_2=T(x_1), x_3=T(x_2),\cdots 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

d(x_{n+1},x_n) \le q^n d(x_1,x_0)

Consequently,

Since \frac{d(x_1,x_0)}{1-q} is finite and 0\le q<1, for any \epsilon > 0, we have d(x_m,x_n)<\epsilon for sufficiently large N<m,n. 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 p_1,p_2,

d(p_1,p_2) = d(T(p_1),T(p_2)) \le q d(p_1,p_2). Since q<1, 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 (A|w|) is a vector with length smaller than \lambda L, where L is the length of w.  Unfortunately, one can easily verify with octave or matlab that it is not true in general. \frac{\|A |w| \|}{\|w\|} > \lambda is possible unless A is symmetric.

Update: I went back and forth as I got rusty with the matrix “expansion” result. Indeed we have something like

\|(A x)\| \le \sigma \|x\|

but \sigma is the singular value instead of the eigenvalue. Because if A = U D V^\top, \|A x\| = \|U D V^\top x\|, the vector length will scale the maximum when x 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.

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