We show that the boundedness of the set of all products of a given pair Sigma of rational matrices is undecidable. Furthermore, we show that the joint (or generalized) spectral radius #(#) is not computable because testing whether #(#)61 is an undecidable problem. As a consequence, the robust stability of linear systems under time-varying perturbations is undecidable, and the same is true for the stability of a simple class of hybrid systems. We also discuss some connections with the so-called "finiteness conjecture". Our results are based on a simple reduction from the emptiness problem for probabilistic finite automata, which is known to be undecidable.

Abstract. The joint spectral radius of a set of matrices is a measure of the maximal asymptotic growth rate that can be obtained by forming long products of matrices taken from the set. This quantity appears in a number of application contexts but is notoriously difficult to compute and to approximate. We introduce in this paper a procedure for approximating the joint spectral radius of a finite set of matrices with arbitrary high accuracy. Our approximation procedure is polynomial in the size of the matrices once the number of matrices and the desired accuracy are fixed. For the special case of matrices with nonnegative entries we give elementary proofs of simple inequalities that we then use to obtain approximations of arbitrary high accuracy. From these inequalities it follows that the spectral radius of matrices with nonnegative entries is given by the simple expression ρ(A1,...,Am) = lim k→ ∞ ρ1/k (A ⊗k 1 + ···+ A⊗k m), where it is somewhat surprising to notice that the right-hand side does not directly involve any mixed product between the matrices. (A ⊗k denotes the kth Kronecker power of A.)