Combinatorial proofs of multivariate Cayley--Hamilton theorems

We give combinatorial proofs of two multivariate Cayley--Hamilton type theorems. The first one is due to Phillips (Amer. J. Math., 1919) involving $2k$ matrices, of which $k$ commute pairwise. The second one regards the mixed discriminant, a matrix function which has generated a lot of interest in recent times. Recently, the Cayley--Hamilton theorem for mixed discriminants was proved by Bapat and Roy (Comb. Math. and Comb. Comp., 2017). We prove a Phillips-type generalization of the Bapat--Roy theorem involving $2nk$ matrices, where $n$ is the size of the matrices, among which $nk$ commute pairwise. Our proofs generalize the univariate proof of Straubing (Disc. Math., 1983) for the original Cayley--Hamilton theorem in a nontrivial way, and involve decorated permutations and decorated paths.

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