THE STEEPEST DESCENT METHOD AND THE CONJUGATE GRADIENT METHOD FOR SLIGHTLY NON-SYMMETRIC, POSITIVE DEFINITE MATRICES

It is known that the steepest descent(SD) method and the conjugate gradient(CG) method [1, 2, 5, 6] converge when these methods are applied to solve linear systems of the form Ax = b, where A is symmetric and positive definite. For some finite difference discretizations of elliptic problems, one gets positive definite matrices that are almost symmetric. Practically, the SD method and the CG method work for these matrices. However, the convergence of these methods is not guaranteed theoretically. The SD method is also called Orthores(1) in iterative method papers. Elman [4] states that the convergence proof for Orthores($\kappa$), with $\kappa$ a positive integer, is not heard. In this paper, we prove that the SD method and the CG method converge when the $\iota$$^2$ matrix norm of the non-symmetric part of a positive definite matrix is less than some value related to the smallest and the largest eigenvalues of the symmetric part of the given matrix.(omitted)