 The method is named after Jørgen Pedersen Gram and Erhard Schmidt, but Pierre-Simon Laplace had been familiar with it before Gram and Schmidt.In the theory of Lie group decompositions it is generalized by the Iwasawa decomposition.The application of the Gram–Schmidt process to the column vectors of a full column rank matrix yields the QR decomposition (it is decomposed into an orthogonal and a triangular matrix).