Deffinition. A square matrix A is said to be unitarily diagonalizable if there exists a unitary matrix U such that U∗AU is diagonal matrix.
Normal matrices are exactly those matrices whose Schur decomposition has a diagonal matrix in the middle.
Theorem. (Spectral Decomposition). Let A ∈Mn with eigenvalues λ1,λ2,…λn. Then A is normal (AA∗ = A∗A i.e., real symmetric, Hermitian) if and only if A is unitarily diagonalizable, that is, there exists a unitary matrix U such that