M 311                                           Spring 2004
                                                                               
                HOMEWORK SUMMARY REPORT
                                                                               
                                                                               
Chapter number: 8
                                                                               
Section number: 2
                                                                               
Exercise number: 4
                                                                               
Number of papers received: 5
                                                                               
Reviewing committee: epsilon
                                                                               
List all participating committee members:
    c-glaser,j-bosshard
                                                                               
Author(s) of paper(s) chosen for publication:  a-coots
                                                                               
Comments: We chose Amanda's paper, because of the depth of its
explanations as well as its taking into account the b=0 case.  All other
papers are correct when b is not equal to zero.

GRADER'S COMMENT:  Nobody made the interesting observation that the 
eigenbasis is independent of b (except for the freedom to choose a 
different one when b = 0).

INSTRUCTOR'S COMMENT:  This exercise gives away the teacher's secret
weapon for finding an exam problem that is easily solvable and is
guaranteed to have a degenerate (multiple) eigenvalue.  Whenever all the
diagonal elements are equal and all the off-diagonal elements are equal to
something else, (1,1,...,1) is always a nondegenerate eigenvector and
all the vectors orthogonal to it are eigenvectors of the second 
eigenvalue.  In nuclear physics the (1,1,...,1) solution is called the 
"giant dipole resonance".