Matrix Spencer conjecture
Let be a positive integer, and let be self-adjoint matrices, each with spectral norm at most one.
Matrix Spencer conjecture. There exists a universal constant such that
\min_{\varepsilon\in\\{\pm1\\}^n} \left\\| \sum_{k=1}^n \varepsilon_k A_k \right\\| \leq C\sqrt{n}.This is a matrix-valued generalization of Spencer's discrepancy theorem. The source states that the conjecture was posed in earlier work and that the present paper proves it, so the claim is solved.
References
Primary source
Afonso S. Bandeira and Helmut Bölcskei, “Matrix Discrepancy for Representations of Finite Groups”, arXiv:2606.12181 (2026).
Additional references
7 papers in this index state this conjecture (2022–2026). The statement above is taken from the most recent of them; the others are arXiv:2606.16005, arXiv:2510.01021, arXiv:2504.20539, arXiv:2410.17887, arXiv:2307.10055, arXiv:2212.00066.
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