Spectra of Hypergraphs

We present a spectral theory of uniform hypergraphs that closely parallels Spectral Graph Theory. A number of developments building upon classical work has led to a rich understanding of \u27symmetric hyperdeterminants\u27 of hypermatrices, a.k.a. multidimensional arrays. Symmetric hyperdeterminants share many properties with determinants, but the context of multilinear algebra is substantially more complicated than the linear algebra required to address Spectral Graph Theory (i.e., ordinary matrices). Nonetheless, it is possible to define eigenvalues of a hypermatrix via its characteristic polynomial as well as variationally. We apply this notion to the \u27adjacency hypermatrix\u27 of a uniform hypergraph, and prove a number of natural analogues of basic results in Spectral Graph Theory