Visualization of the SVD of a two-dimensional, real shearing matrix M. First, we see the unit disc in blue together with the two canonical unit vectors. We then see the action of M, which distorts the disk to an ellipse. The SVD decomposes M into three simple transformations: an initial rotation V∗, a scaling Σ along the coordinate axes, and a final rotation U. The lengths σ1 and σ2 of the semi-axes of the ellipse are the singular values of M, namely Σ1,1 and Σ2,2.