The last months I have seldom written posts in this blog. The reason is that I am occupied with a book about “The geometry of Multivariate Normal Distributions”. Which will cover a lot more topics than the ones discussed in this blog so far. One of those topics is the use of quadratic form functions as graph functions to produce… Read More »Quadratic form functions as graph functions – I – level sets and gradients
Some of my readers know that I am presently writing a book about Multivariate Normal distributions and related geometric properties of their level sets (multidimensional ellipsoids). For certain topics of the book, I sometimes use the latest free edition of ChatGPT to verify some claims and to get a list of respective papers. Sometimes also for a proof … However,… Read More »Getting the semi-axes of an ellipse by differentiation of its graph functions – a simple step for a human, but not for ChatGPT 5.x ….
In the third post of this series we have discussed an idea of I. Rivin (see [1], [2]). Rivin has shown that the surface area of a general (n-1)-dimensional ellipsoid in a n-dimensional Euclidean space can be expressed in terms of an expectation value of a specific function weighted by a multivariate Gaussian probability density [pdf]. In contrast to (n-1)-spheres… Read More »n-dimensional spheres and ellipsoids – IV – numerical check of Rivin’s formula for the surface areas of ellipsoids in 3 dimensions and the perimeters of ellipses
In the math section of this blog, we try to cover interesting aspects of Multivariate Normal Distributions [MVNs]. The topic of this post series is the covariance matrix of a MVN-like distribution confined inside a hyper-surface of constant probability density. Outside of the surface we set the probability density to zero. This gives us a “cut-off” MVN- distribution. Contour surfaces… Read More »Covariance matrix of a cut-off Multivariate Normal Distribution – III – results for a 2-dimensional BVN-core and proper normalization of its cut-off distribution