Past exam of the year 2 of the earth sciences (geology) course of the University of Oxford / 2024 / Paper 3 / 5 / d

For each row, a Gershgorin disc has centre $a_{jj}=-2$ and radius $r_j={\sum }_{k\ne j}|a_{jk}|$. Here $r_1=r_3=1$ and $r_2=2$, so the Gershgorin circle theorem givesSince $A$ is a real symmetric matrix, its eigenvalues are real. Intersecting the union of these Gershgorin discs with the real axis yieldsThis bound permits zero but does not assert a zero eigenvalue. The fixed-end Dirichlet boundary conditions exclude it: for any nonzero real vector $v=(v_1,v_2,v_3{)}^T$, extend by $v_0=v_4=0$ and calculateIndeed, equality would force every adjacent value to agree with the zero endpoint. Thus $-A$ is a symmetric positive-definite matrix, $A$ is a negative-definite matrix, and the eigenvalues satisfy $-4\le \lambda <0$. The same argument works for any number of interior grid points, with prefactor $c^2/h^2>0$ in the sum. The fixed string has no zero-frequency rigid translation.