A simple derivation of the eigenvalues of a tridiagonal matrix arising in biogeography
In investigating a certain optimization problem in biogeography, Simon [IEEE Trans. Evolutionary Comput. 12 (2008), 702-713] encountered a certain specially structured tridiagonal matrix and made a conjecture regarding its eigenvalues. A few years later, the validity of the conjecture was established by Igelnik and Simon [Appl. Math. Comput. 218 (2011), 195-201]. In this paper, we give another proof of this conjecture that is much shorter, almost computation-free, and does not resort to the eigenvectors...