Volume: 114 • Pages: 549-571

The two-sided Rayleigh quotient iteration proposed by Ostrowski computes a pair of corresponding left–right eigenvectors of a matrix C. We propose a Grassmannian version of this iteration, i.e., its iterates are pairs of p-dimensional subspaces instead of one-dimensional subspaces in the classical case. The new iteration generically converges locally cubically to the pairs of left–right p-dimensional invariant subspaces of C. Moreover, Grassmannian versions of the Rayleigh quotient iteration are given for the generalized Hermitian eigenproblem, the Hamiltonian eigenproblem and the skew-Hamiltonian eigenproblem.