Abstract
We develop a recipe which allows one to recursively and uniquely decouple the large scale from the small scale in mass matrices of the seesaw type, up to any order in the inverse of the large scale. Our method allows one to calculate the mass matrix of the light neutrinos with arbitrary precision. The same method can be applied in the case of quark mass matrices in an extension of the Standard Model with vector-like quarks which have mass terms at a scale much higher than the electroweak scale.