J Math Chem (2010) 47:21–28 DOI 10.1007/s10910-009-9529-1 ORIGINAL PAPER Maximum eigenvalue of the reciprocal distance matrix Kinkar Ch. Das Received: 10 December 2008 / Accepted: 21 January 2009 / Published online: 12 February 2009 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2009 Abstract In this paper, we obtain the lower and upper bounds of the maximum eigenvalue of the reciprocal distance matrix of a connected (molecular) graph. We also give the Nordhaus-Gaddum-type result for the maximum eigenvalue. Keywords Molecular graph · Reciprocal distance matrix · Maximum eigenvalue · Diameter · Lower bound · Upper bound 1 Introduction Since the distance matrix and related matrices, based on graph-theoretical distances [1], are rich sources of many graph invariants (topological indices) that have found use in structure-property-activity modeling [24], it is of interest to study spectra and polynomials of these matrices [57]. Let G = (V , E ) be a simple connected graph with vertex set V (G) ={v 1 ,v 2 ,..., v n } and edge set E (G), where |V (G)|= n and | E (G)|= m. Let G be the complement of G. For v i V (G), Ŵ(v i ) denotes the set of its (first) neighbors in G and the degree of v i is d i =|Ŵ(v i )|. The minimum vertex degree is denoted by δ and the maximum by . The average of the degrees of the vertices adjacent to v i is denoted by μ i . The diameter of a graph is the maximum distance between any two vertices of G. Let d be the diameter of G. The distance matrix D of G is an n × n matrix (d i , j ) such that d i , j is just the distance (i.e., the number of edges of a shortest path) between the vertices v i and v j in G [1]. The reciprocal distance matrix RD of G, also called the Harary matrix [1], is an n × n matrix ( RD i , j ) such that [8, 9]. K. Ch. Das (B ) Department of Mathematics, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon 440-746, Republic of Korea e-mail: kinkar@lycos.com 123