We study extrema of the first and the second mixed eigenvalues of the Laplacian on the disk among some families of Dirichlet--Neumann boundary conditions. We show that the minimizer of the second eigenvalue among all mixed boundary conditions lies in a compact $1$-parameter family for which an explicit description is given. Moreover, we prove that among all partitions of the boundary with bounded number of parts on which Dirichlet and Neumann conditions are imposed alternately, the first eigenvalue is maximized by the uniformly distributed partition.

Let $A$ and $B$ be $n\times n$ complex Hermitian (or real symmetric) matrices with eigenvalues $a_1 \ge \dots \ge a_n$ and $b_1 \ge \dots \ge b_n$. All possible inertia values, ranks, and multiple eigenvalues of $A + B$ are determined. Extension of the results to the sum of $k$ matrices with $k > 2$ and connections of the results to other subjects such as algebraic combinatorics are also discussed.