Let $S=\{x_1,\cdots ,x_n\}$ be a set of $n$ distinct positive integers and $e\ge 1$ an integer. Denote the $n\times n$ power GCD (resp. power LCM) matrix on $S$ having the $e$-th power of the greatest common divisor $(x_i,x_j)$ (resp. the $e$-th power of the least common multiple $[x_i,x_j]$) as the $(i,j)$-entry of the matrix by $\left({(x_i,x_j)}^e\right)$ (resp. $\left({[x_i,x_j]}^e\right))$. We call the set $S$ an odd gcd closed (resp. odd lcm closed) set if every element in $S$ is an odd number and $(x_i,x_j)\in S$ (resp. $[x_i,x_j]\in S$) for all $1\le i,j\le n$. In studying the divisibility of the power LCM and power GCD matrices, Hong conjectured in...

Suppose that $A$ is an $n\times n$ nonnegative matrix whose eigenvalues are $\lambda =\rho \left(A\right),{\lambda }_2,...,{\lambda }_n$. Fiedler and others have shown that $det(\lambda I-A)\le {\lambda }^n-{\rho }^n$, for all $\lambda >\rho$, with equality for any such $\lambda$ if and only if $A$ is the simple cycle matrix. Let $a_i$ be the signed sum of the determinants of the principal submatrices of $A$ of order $i\times i$, $i=1,...,n-1$. We use similar techniques to Fiedler to show that Fiedler’s inequality can be strengthened to: $det(\lambda I-A)+{\sum }_{i=1}^{n-1}{\rho }^{n-2i}\left|a_i\right|{(\lambda -\rho )}^i\le {\lambda }^n-{\rho }^n$, for all $\lambda \ge \rho$. We use this inequality to derive the inequality that: ${\prod }_2^n(\rho -{\lambda }_i)\le {\rho }^{n-2}{\sum }_{i=2}^n(\rho -{\lambda }_i)$. In the spirit of a celebrated conjecture...

The paper is motivated by the stochastic comparison of the reliability of non-repairable $k$-out-of-$n$ systems. The lifetime of such a system with nonidentical components is compared with the lifetime of a system with identical components. Formally the problem is as follows. Let $U_i,i=1,...,n,$ be positive independent random variables with common distribution $F$. For ${\lambda }_i\>0$ and $\mu \>0$, let consider $X_i=U_i/{\lambda }_i$ and $Y_i=U_i/\mu ,i=1,...,n$. Remark that this is no more than a change of scale for each term. For $k\in \{1,2,...,n\},$ let us define $X_{k:n}$ to be the $k$th order...

Let f be an arithmetical function. A set S = x₁,..., xₙ of n distinct positive integers is called multiple closed if y ∈ S whenever x|y|lcm(S) for any x ∈ S, where lcm(S) is the least common multiple of all elements in S. We show that for any multiple closed set S and for any divisor chain S (i.e. x₁|...|xₙ), if f is a completely multiplicative function such that (f*μ)(d) is a nonzero integer whenever d|lcm(S), then the matrix $\left(f(x_i,x_i)\right)$ having f evaluated at the greatest common divisor $(x_i,x_i)$ of...