The Moore-Penrose pseudo-inverse is discontinuous
Statement
For (singular value decomposition) the Moore-Penrose pseudo-inverse is , where inverts the nonzero diagonal entries and keeps the zeros. Show that is discontinuous at every matrix of rank .
Hint
Start with and . For rank , add a small multiple of a rank-one term built from singular vectors.
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Solution
The case . . Let with . Then but has norm . So is not continuous at (it is not even bounded near ).
General rank . Write with , where and are orthonormal families. Since we can complete the families and pick unit vectors orthogonal to the previous ones. Put
This is a singular value decomposition of with , so and
But while is a fixed matrix. So is not the limit of .
Remark. The pseudo-inverse is continuous exactly on the set of matrices of *locally constant rank*, i.e. on each stratum and at the invertible matrices (where ). This is why numerical rank decisions ("is this singular value zero?") are delicate.