Linear programming and operator means (Q1813693)

The author shows that the parallel sum, the shorted operator, the geometric mean, and the cascade limit are all examples of operations that can be described as a solution of suitable linear programming problem in the space of self adjoint operators on a finite-dimensional complex Hilbert space. Absence of duality gap in the corresponding program is proved. This fact implies a new result for the computation of geometric mean of two positive semidefinite matrices.