It looks like Joseph O'Rourke has beaten me, but I've generated a bit more data than he has: Let $l$ be the lower bound so that the non-diagonal entries are uniformly distributed between $l$ and 1 and the diagonal entries are distributed between $l+1$ and 2. Note that Piero's original characterization of his code was inaccurate, but I just used his code to generate the figures below. Here is a grid of eigenvalues of such $N$ by $N$ matrices with $l=-.9$ (plots are labeled by $N$) ![-.9 plot][2] Here's the picture with $l=-.87$ ![-.87 plot][1] Here's the picture with $l=-.93$ ![-.93 plot][3] And here's a picture of the absolute value of the largest eigenvalue of the matrix as a function of $N$ (now the label is $l$) ![plot of largest eigenvalues][4] **Edit based on Helge's comment**: Here's a picture of $\max_{1\leq j \leq N} \sum_{n=1}^{N} u_j^N(n)$ as a function of $N$ (the $u_j^N$ are normalized eigenvectors) with $l=-0.9$ ![plot of largest sum][5] And here's a picture of the further normalized version $\max_{1\leq j \leq N} \frac{1}{\sqrt{N}}\sum_{n=1}^{N} u_j^N(n)$ ![plot of largest sum normalized][6] [1]: http://i583.photobucket.com/albums/ss275/jaspercrowne/Screenshot2010-07-03at93508AM.png [2]: http://i583.photobucket.com/albums/ss275/jaspercrowne/Screenshot2010-07-03at92431AM.png [3]: http://i583.photobucket.com/albums/ss275/jaspercrowne/Screenshot2010-07-03at92844AM.png [4]: http://i583.photobucket.com/albums/ss275/jaspercrowne/Screenshot2010-07-03at95101AM.png [5]: http://i583.photobucket.com/albums/ss275/jaspercrowne/Screenshot2010-07-03at103302AM.png [6]: http://i583.photobucket.com/albums/ss275/jaspercrowne/Screenshot2010-07-03at103813AM.png