Word.ws English Dictionary

positive-definite

positive-definite adjective: said of a real, square matrix: that the product of it with a column vector on its right side and the transpose of that column vector on its left side is greater or equal to zero, only equaling zero if the vector itself is zero.

Adjective

positive-definite (not comparable)

  1. Said of a real, square matrix: that the product of it with a column vector on its right side and the transpose of that column vector on its left side is greater or equal to zero, only equaling zero if the vector itself is zero.
  2. Said of a quadratic form: that the application of it to a tuple is greater or equal to zero, only equaling zero if the tuple itself is zero.

Antonyms of positive-definite

  • negative-definite

Forms of positive-definite

alternative formpositive definite

Questions about positive-definite

What does positive-definite mean?
Positive-definite means said of a real, square matrix: that the product of it with a column vector on its right side and the transpose of that column vector on its left side is greater or equal to zero, only equaling zero if the vector itself is zero.
What part of speech is positive-definite?
Positive-definite is an adjective.

Words near positive-definite in the dictionary

  1. positive transfers
  2. positive transition
  3. positive zero
  4. positive zeroes
  5. positive zeros
  6. positive-definite
  7. positive-edge-triggered
  8. positive-sum
  9. positively
  10. positiveness
  11. positivenesses

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: positive-definite (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “positive-definite.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/positive-definite. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.