ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Schur decomposition

Schur decomposition is like turning a jumbled up toy box into neat piles of toys.

Imagine you have a toy box with lots of toys mixed together. You want to sort the toys, so you start by looking for the biggest toy in the box. Once you find it, you take it out and put it in a pile by itself. Then, you look for the next biggest toy and put it in another pile. You keep doing this until all the toys are sorted into their own piles.

Schur decomposition is the same thing, but with numbers instead of toys. You have a big square box called a matrix, and it's full of numbers. Schur decomposition is a way to sort those numbers into neat piles, just like you sorted the toys. But instead of looking for the "biggest" number, we use a fancy trick called diagonalization to find special numbers called eigenvalues.

Once we have the eigenvalues, we can group the numbers in the matrix into piles called eigenvectors. Each eigenvector has its own eigenvalue, just like each pile of toys has its own biggest toy. And just like how we can easily play with toys that are neatly sorted into piles, we can easily work with matrices that are neatly decomposed into eigenvector sets.

So basically, Schur decomposition is a way to take a big mess of numbers and sort them into neat piles called eigenvectors, based on the special numbers called eigenvalues. It's like tidying up a toy box, but for math!