Speaker : Professor Chi-Kwong Li (College of William and Mary)
Title : One horse racing story, two kinds of card games, three matrix theorems
Time : 2011-12-01 (Thu) 15:00 - 16:00
Place : Auditorium, 6 Floor, Institute of Mathematics (NTU Campus)
Abstract: Motivated by a horse racing story in ancient China, we discuss two kinds of card games. It turns out that the winning and losing patterns of the games are connected to the inertia of the difference of two Hermitian matrices. Three matrix theorems are obtained to describe all the possible outcomes of the card games. A key ingredient in the proofs is the generalized interlacing inequalities on the eigenvalues of a Hermitian matrix and its submatrices obtained by Ky Fan and Pall.