A theory capable of producing equilibrium configurations of point vortices in the plane, along with a numerical scheme to compute them, is described. The theory is formulated as a problem in linear algebra where one must find solutions to the matrix equation
, where
A
is the (1/2)
N
(
N
−1)×
N
non-normal configuration matrix obtained by requiring that all intervortical distances remain fixed, and
are the
N
-vortex strengths. For existence of an equilibrium,
A
must have a non-trivial nullspace. We consider the singular values of
A
; when this has one or more zero singular values, the nullspace of
A
is non-empty and an equilibrium exists for some choice of
Γ
. New equilibrium configurations are found numerically by randomly depositing
N
points in the plane, which generically gives rise to a configuration matrix
A
with empty nullspace. Using the sum of squares of the
k
smallest singular values of
A
as a ‘ratchet’, we ‘thermally fluctuate’ the configuration, allowing each point to execute a random walk in the plane, retaining only those configurations which reduce this quantity at the next step. The configuration is thus driven to one with nullspace (
A
)=
k
>0. These converged states are not necessarily nearby their initial configurations, typically they are asymmetric, and often we can drive the same initial state to several different equilibria. A reverse-ratchet method is also described, which can produce initial conditions that would evolve to a specified equilibrium state. Once a converged final state is achieved, the full singular value decomposition of
A
is used to calculate an optimal basis set for the nullspace of
A
and thus all allowable
Γ
. The
distribution
of the singular values gives important information on the size of each equilibrium state (as measured by Frobenius norm), their distance from each other (spacing and density) and how far a randomly chosen system of
N
points in the plane is from the nearest equilibrium configuration with a specified rank, as well as its Shannon entropy.
Stationary states of identical point vortices and vortex foam on the sphere
