Adam Sørensen (UiO): Almost commuting matrices

Adam Sørensen (UiO) will give a talk with title: Almost commuting matrices

Abstract: Two matrices A,B are said to almost commute if AB is close to BA (in a suitable norm). A question of Halmos, answered by Lin, asks if two almost commuting self-adjoint matrices are always close to two exactly commuting self-adjoint matrices. We will survey what is known about this and similar questions, and report on recent work with Loring concerning how the questions change if we look at real rather than complex matrices.