Systems and methodologies are described that facilitate equalization of received signals in a wireless communication environment. Using multiple transmit and/or receive antennas and MIMO technology, multiple data streams can be transmitted within a single tone. During equalization, receivers can separate data received within a tone into individual data streams. The equalization process generally is computationally expensive. Equalizer functions include the inverse operation, which can be computed using the fast square root method; however, the fast square root method involves large numbers of computations for a set of matrices, where the size of a matrix in the set of matrices increases with the number of transmit or receive antennas. Utilizing a modification of the fast square root method, a subset of the elements of the matrices can be selected and updated to reduce the number and/or complexity of computations.