Abstract. Conditioning of a nonsingular matrix subspace is addressed in terms of its best conditioned elements. Computationally the problem is seemingly challenging. By associating with the task an intersection problem with unitary matrices leads to a more accessible approach. A resulting matrix nearness problem can be viewed to generalize the so-called Löwdin problem in quantum chemistry. For critical points in the Frobenius norm, a differential equation on the manifold of unitary matrices is derived. Another resulting matrix nearness problem allows locating points of optimality more directly, once formulated as a problem in computational algebraic geometry.Key words. conditioning, matrix intersection problem, matrix nearness problem, Löwdin's problem, generalized eigenvalue problem AMS subject classifications. 15A12, 65F351. Introduction. This paper is concerned with the problem of conditioning of a nonsingular matrix subspace V of C n×n over C (or R). Matrix subspaces typically appear in large scale numerical linear algebra problems where assuming additional structure is quite unrealistic. Nonsingularity means that there exists invertible elements in V. The conditioning of V is then defined in terms of its best conditioned elements. In the applications that we have in mind, typically dim V ≪ n 2 . For example, in the generalized eigenvalue problem dim V = 2 only. In this paper the task of assessing conditioning is formulated as a matrix intersection problem for V and the set of unitary matrices.1 Since this can be done in many ways, the interpretation is amenable to computations through matrix nearness problems and versatile enough in view of addressing operator theoretic problems more generally.Denote by U (n) the set of unitary matrices in C n×n . The intersection problem for V and U (n), which are both smooth submanifolds of C n×n , can be formulated as a matrix nearness problem