Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
This paper surveys the contributions of five mathematicians --- Eugenio Beltrami (1835--1899), Camille Jordan (1838--1921), James Joseph Sylvester (1814--1897), Erhard Schmidt (1876--1959), and Hermann Weyl (1885--1955) --- who were responsible for establishing the existence of the singular value decomposition and developing its theory.
G. W. Stewart (Wed,) studied this question.