TITLE: What is the right citation for the power iteration method to find eigenvalues?
QUESTION [7 upvotes]: What is the right citation for the power iteration method to find eigenvalues, if I want to cite the method in a paper? I've seen some Google PageRank references in this context. But Brin and Page didn't invent the power iteration method, did they?

REPLY [3 votes]: In his Ph.D. thesis Erhard Schmidt proved the existence of an eigenfunction of a symmetric integral operator by using iterated kernels, the equivalent of matrix powers in a function space. In order to avoid convergence problems in the case of eigenvalues of equal modulus, he did not apply the integral operator directly to a function. 
https://gdz.sub.uni-goettingen.de/id/PPN235181684_0063?tify=%7B%22pages%22:[479]%7D
In his 1909 textbook "Determinantentheorie" Gerhard Kowalewski, a distant relative of Kovalevskaya's husband, gave a finite-dimensional version of Schmidt's existence proof for a symmetric matrix T, and then proposed "a simple infinite process to get to an invariant of T", the power method.