Last week I had a cold and could not do much thinking. So I spent my time making TikZ pictures for an upcoming talk of mine. This talk is on my recent work with Akihiro Munemasa on constructing cospectral strongly regular graphs. I think that the pictures are nice for a blog post, so here we go.
1. The Spectrum of a Graph
Two graphs and
are called cospectral if their adjacency matrices
and
have the same eigenvalues. This is the same as saying that there is an orthogonal matrix
with
. Any permutation matrix is a valid choice for
, but this is not very interesting as then
and
are isomorphic. Chris Godsil and Brendan McKay described one of the easiest interesting choices for
in 1982. For a graph
on
vertices, a simplified version of their matrix is