Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge / 2014 / iii / Paper 66 / 4 / a / Solution

By orthogonal diagonalization of a real symmetric matrix, write $A=Q\mathrm{diag}({\lambda }_1,\dots ,{\lambda }_d)Q^T$, with orthogonal $Q$. Its matrix exponential has the same eigenvectors and positive eigenvalues $e^{t{\lambda }_j}$. Orthogonal invariance of the induced Euclidean norm gives the exact identityThis proves the requested inequality with equality. If a real number $\beta$ gave the bound for every $t\ge 0$, evaluating on a unit eigenvector for ${\lambda }_{\max }(A)$ at any $t>0$ would give $e^{t{\lambda }_{\max }}\le e^{t\beta }$, so $\beta \ge {\lambda }_{\max }$. Thus the stated exponent is the smallest possible. For a symmetric matrix the spectral abscissa and Euclidean logarithmic norm coincide, unlike the general nonsymmetric case in Question 1.