The matrix notation of signum? The following question on a notation might look trivial but I am really not sure how to deal with it.
If I have a variable $x$, I could write out:
$$x=|x|\;\text {sgn} (x)$$
a notation that helps me with an operator for the signs that could point to $-1$, $0$ or $+1$.
But then I have a matrix $\bf X$ with elements $x_{i,j}$ while the equation above holds for each element $x_{i,j}$, simply
$$x_{i,j}=|x_{i,j}|\;\text {sgn} (x_{i,j})$$
How does the matrix notation for the equation above look like, in terms of a matrix of $\bf X$ (and not individual elements)?
 A: The matrix sign function is defined in several equivalent ways. The one closest to what you're asking is
$$\mathop{\rm sign}(A) = A(A^2)^{-1/2}.$$
You can also use Jordan decomposition, integral definition,...
To find more about this, I advise reading Higham's "Functions of Matrices: Theory and Computation" (mostly Chapter 5, but some of the other chapters also draw a connection to the sign function).
A: In multidimensioned normed space (e.g. matrices, vectors...) you can define a generalisation of the "sign" by saying
$$sg(x):=\frac{x}{\|x\|},\quad x\ne 0.$$
Then you will obtain that in a any matrix norm
$$X=\|X\|\cdot sg(X).$$
Note, however, there's no widely accepted notation for applying a function to the matrix element-wise, so you're free to introduce your own.
A: It is more complicated than it looks. If you have a square complex matrix $A$ you can decompose it into a product 
$$A=UP$$
where $U$ is unitary and $P$ is semidefinite positive. It is a generalization of the decomposition of a complex number $z$ as 
$$z=e^{i\theta} \lvert z \rvert.$$
See Polar decomposition on Wikipedia.
P.S.: Of course this has nothing to do with the sign decomposition of individual entries of the matrix. For that one I am afraid that a unified notation does not exist, so you will have to craft one by yourself.
A: Define the element-wise abs() function of the matrix $X$ as follows
$$\eqalign{
A &= {\rm abs}(X) \;\doteq\; {\rm sqrt}\big(X\odot X^*\big) \\
}$$
Also define an element-wise pseudoinverse $A^\oplus$ operation
$$
A_{ij}^\oplus = \begin{cases}
\;0\quad&{\rm if}\;A_{ij} = 0 \\
A_{ij}^{-1}\quad&{\rm otherwise} \\
\end{cases}
$$
and use this to define an element-wise sign() function
$$\eqalign{
S &= {\rm sign}(X) \;\doteq\; X \odot A^\oplus \\
}$$
where $\odot$ denotes the elementwise/Hadamard product and $X^*$ the complex conjugate.
With this definition, one has the following useful relationships
$$\eqalign{
A\odot S &= X \\
A\odot A &= X\odot X^* \\
}$$

All of which describes the element-wise invocation of the Julia sign function
S = sign.(X)

