On the Early History of the Singular Value Decomposition

This paper surveys the contributions of five mathematicians—Eugenio Beltrami (1835–1899), Camille Jordan (1838–1921), James Joseph Sylvester (1814–1897), Erhard Schmidt (1876–1959), and Hermann Weyl (1885–1955)—who were responsible for establishing the existence of the singular value decomposition and developing its theory.