Finiteness property of pairs of \(2\times 2\) sign-matrices via real extremal polytope norms (Q1044575)

The authors address the problem of establishing the finiteness property of pairs of \(2 \times 2\) sign-matrices. In most non-trivial cases, this is made possible by detecting an extremal real polytope norm for the family constituted by two sign-matrices. An algorithm is presented that, under some suitable assumptions, is able to check if a certain product in the multiplicative semigroup is spectrum maximizing. The algorithm can be used in a floating point arithmetic and provides a general tool for approximating the joint spectral radius of a set of matrices. The technique used in the paper could suggest an extension to the analysis to \(n \times n\) sign-matrices, which still remains an open problem.