ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Golden–Thompson inequality

Okay, so have you ever had to share something with your friends? Maybe you had a bag of candy and you wanted to split it evenly. Well, there are some fancy math rules that tell us how fairly we are sharing things. The Golden-Thompson Inequality is one of these rules.

Let's pretend that you have two bags of candy, and each bag has a different number of pieces. One bag has 3 pieces of candy, and the other bag has 5 pieces of candy. If you want to split them evenly between 2 friends, you might give each friend 4 pieces of candy. But is this fair?

The Golden-Thompson Inequality helps us figure out if something is fair or not. It says that if you have two bags of candy with different amounts, and you want to split them between two people, the most fair way to do it is to give each person the square root of the number of pieces in each bag.

So in our example, the first bag has 3 pieces of candy. The square root of 3 is about 1.73. The other bag has 5 pieces of candy. The square root of 5 is about 2.24. If we give each friend 1.73 pieces of candy from the first bag, and 2.24 pieces of candy from the second bag, then we will have split the candy as fairly as possible.

The Golden-Thompson Inequality is important because it helps us share things equally, even if they are not the same amount. It's just like when you're dividing up candy with your friends - you want to make sure everyone gets their fair share.