Hoffman's ratio bound

Abstract

Hoffman's ratio bound is an upper bound for the independence number of a regular graph in terms of the eigenvalues of the adjacency matrix. The bound has proved to be very useful and has been applied many times. Hoffman did not publish his result, and for a great number of users the emergence of Hoffman's bound is a black hole. With this note I hope to clarify the history of this bound and some of its generalizations.