Inseparable Gershgorin discs and the existence of conjugate complex eigenvalues of real matrices (Q6561279)

The paper investigates the relationship between the existence of nonreal eigenvalues of a matrix \(A\) and the overlapping of the Gershgorin discs of \(D^{-1} AD\) for an arbitrary diagonal matrix \(D\).\N\NThis study is carried out in the case of \(2 \times 2\) matrices \(A=(a_{ij})\) which are sign skew-symmetric, i.e., \(a_{ij} a_{ji} < 0\) for \(i \neq j\). For \(3 \times 3\) matrices, the authors show that existence of real eigenvalues is not a sufficient condition for the Gershgorin discs to be separable by positive diagonal similarity. In the last section the authors study the case \(n \times n\) using \(2 \times 2\) principal submatrices.