On the inertia of the block H-matrices

Abstract

Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. The problem of determining matrix inertia is very important in many applications, for example, in stability analysis of dynamical systems. In the (point-wise) H-matrix case, it was proven that the diagonal entries solely reveal this information. This paper generalises these results to the block H-matrix cases for 1, 2, and ∞ matrix norms. The usefulness of the block approach is illustrated on 3 relevant numerical examples, arising in engineering.