Developments on the Hoffman program of graphs (Q6963385)

This well-written survey article provides a clear view of the work around the Hoffman program in spectral graph theory, as well as major new results that broaden \textit{A. J. Hoffman}'s theorem [Lect. Notes Math. None, 165--172 (1972; Zbl 0297.15016)].\N\NThe paper begins by outlining the historical origins of the Hoffman program, which seeks to (i) determine all possible limit points (\(M\)-limit points) of the spectral radii of graphs associated with a given matrix \(M\), and (ii) characterize all connected graphs whose \(M\)-spectral radius does not exceed a fixed limit point. The authors review known results for classical graph matrices -- the adjacency (\(A\)), Laplacian (\(L\)) and signless Laplacian (\(Q\)) matrices -- before extending the discussion to more recent algebraic structures such as Hermitian adjacency matrices of mixed graphs, signed adjacency matrices, skew-adjacency matrices of oriented graphs, and adjacency tensors of uniform hypergraphs. The main contribution lies in their analysis of the \(A_\alpha\)-matrix, a convex combination of the degree and adjacency matrices introduced by \textit{V. Nikiforov} [Appl. Anal. Discrete Math. 11, No. 1, 81--107 (2017; Zbl 1499.05384)], where they derive new expressions for characteristic polynomials of paths and related graphs and study the limiting behavior of the \(A_\alpha\)-spectral radius for graph sequences. These efforts culminate in generalized Hoffman theorems that characterize all limit points below a certain value \(\Psi(\alpha)\), unifying earlier results by recovering Hoffman's theorem for \(A\) (\(\alpha=0\)) and analogous theorems for \(L\) and \(Q\) (\(\alpha=1/2\)). The use of \texttt{Mathematica} for symbolic computation is reported as crucial to obtaining closed-form expressions, and the paper closes with open problems and conjectures, offering clear directions for future work.