Cartan–Dieudonné theorem
In mathematics, the Cartan–Dieudonné theorem, named after Élie Cartan and Jean Dieudonné, establishes that every orthogonal transformation in an n-dimensional symmetric bilinear space can be described as the composition of at most n reflections. The notion of a symmetric bilinear space is a generalization of Euclidean space whose structure is defined by a symmetric bilinear form (which need not be positive definite, so is not necessarily an inner product – for instance, a pseudo-Euclidean space is also a symmetric bilinear space).