9

How can I go about proving the triangle inequality holds for the Frobenius norm?

I worked through $\|A+B\|_F \le \|A\|_F + \|B\|_F$ and was not able to make it work =/.

Incognito
  • 435

2 Answers2

13

You can use the fact that it's a norm from inner product : $$\langle A,B \rangle = \text{Trace}(A^TB)$$ Then: $$\|A+B\|^2=\|A\|^2+\|B\|^2+2\langle A,B\rangle$$ using Cauchy-Schwarz inequalitie we have : $$\langle A,B\rangle \leq \|A\| \|B\|$$ and this gives: $$\|A+B\|^2 \leq \|A\|^2+\|B\|^2+2 \|A\| \|B\|= (\|A\| + \|B\|)^2$$

Mohamed
  • 3,651
  • It might be problematic using Cauchy-Schwartz, as usually you need to prove triangle-inequality to prove a function is indeed a norm, but CS requires you to know it's a norm (or an inner product for that case). – theFrok Nov 23 '21 at 11:14
7

It suffices to show $$\sqrt{\sum_{i=1}^nx_i^2}+\sqrt{\sum_{i=1}^ny_i^2}\geqslant\sqrt{\sum_{i=1}^n(x_i+y_i)^2}.$$Sqaure it, it's equivalent to show$$\sqrt{\sum_{i=1}^nx_i^2}\sqrt{\sum_{i=1}^ny_i^2}\geqslant\sum_{i=1}^nx_iy_i,$$ which is the Cauchy-Schwartz Inequality.

It also works in $\mathbb{C}$ with slight modification.

amWhy
  • 209,954
Nirvanacs
  • 1,523
  • 9
  • 14