Abstract
In 1970 Kovarik proposed approximate orthogonalization algorithms. One of them (algorithm B) has quadratic convergence but requires at each iteration the inversion of a matrix of similar dimension to the initial one. An attempt to overcome this difficulty was made by replacing the inverse with a finite Neumann series expansion involving the original matrix and its adjoint. Unfortunately, this new algorithm loses the quadratic convergence and requires a large number of terms in the Neumann series which results in a dramatic increase in the computational effort per iteration. In this paper we propose a much simpler algorithm which, by using only the first two terms in a different series expansion, gives us the desired result with linear convergence. Systematic numerical experiments for collocation and Toeplitz matrices are also described.