Degrees of freedom don't necessarily have to have a geometric meaning in some (many) systems! For example, in basic analysis of mechanical vibrations you can us

Degrees of freedom don't necessarily have to have a geometric meaning in some (many) systems! For example, in basic analysis of mechanical vibrations you can use modal analysis to decompose a coupled system (two harmonic oscillators with viscous dampers in series for example) into two independent systems. The eigenvalues here correspond to the natural frequencies and the eigenvectors are the modal shapes, which give you an idea of how the oscillators actually end up moving after some disturbance. There is some geometrical significance here but is not quite as easy to interpret.