Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge / 2012 / iii / Paper 31 / 2 / iii

The Hoffman–Wielandt inequality says that for normal matrices $A,B$ with eigenvalues ${\alpha }_i,{\beta }_i$, there is a permutation $\pi$ such thatwhere $\Vert \cdot {\Vert }_F$ is the Frobenius norm and $\ast$ denotes the conjugate transpose. For Hermitian matrices, the increasingly ordered real eigenvalues may be paired directly: this ordering minimizes the sum of squared distances over all permutations, by removing crossed pairs. In particular, for the real symmetric matrices in this question,The square on the right is justified by symmetry. For arbitrary matrices, the appropriate expression is the conjugate-transpose product, not the ordinary square.