GSL Shell gives access to some functions of linear algebra based on GSL itself or on the BLAS routines.
A general rectangular M-by-N matrix A has a singular value decomposition (SVD) into the product of an M-by-N orthogonal matrix U, an N-by-N diagonal matrix of singular values S and the transpose of an N-by-N orthogonal square matrix V,
The singular values σi = Σii are all non-negative and are generally chosen to form a non-increasing sequence σ1 >= σ2 >= ... >= σN >= 0.
The singular value decomposition of a matrix has many practical uses. The condition number of the matrix is given by the ratio of the largest singular value to the smallest singular value. The presence of a zero singular value indicates that the matrix is singular. The number of non-zero singular values indicates the rank of the matrix. In practice singular value decomposition of a rank-deficient matrix will not produce exact zeroes for singular values, due to finite numerical precision. Small singular values should be edited by choosing a suitable tolerance.
For a rank-deficient matrix, the null space of A is given by the columns of V corresponding to the zero singular values. Similarly, the range of A is given by columns of U corresponding to the non-zero singular values.
Note that the routines here compute the “thin” version of the SVD with U as M-by-N orthogonal matrix. This allows in-place computation and is the most commonly-used form in practice. Mathematically, the “full” SVD is defined with U as an M-by-M orthogonal matrix and S as an M-by-N diagonal matrix (with additional rows of zeros).
This function returns three values, in the order, U, Σ, V. So you can write something like that:
u, s, v = svd(m)