Seminar series
Date
Thu, 10 Oct 2002
Time
14:00 -
15:00
Location
Comlab
Speaker
Prof Beresford Parlett
Organisation
UC Berkeley
We describe "avoidance of crossing" and its explanation by von
Neumann and Wigner. We show Lax's criterion for degeneracy and then
discover matrices whose determinants give the discriminant of the
given matrix. This yields a simple proof of the bound given by
Ilyushechkin on the number of terms in the expansion of the discriminant
as a sum of squares. We discuss the 3 x 3 case in detail.