My Differential Equations class eons ago barely touched on Eigenvalue problems, and I was beyond pissed that they waited to go over Laplace Transforms until I already was forced to learn them because I needed them in my Mechanical Engineering classes.
My ode professor Dr. Haw, made sure we covered Laplace Transforms. It sure came in handy when I took control theory. The abstract of this paper is too vague for me to understand. It appears that the author is working on a problem in spectral graph theory, but I could be wrong. A quicker partitioning algorithm would have a lot of practical uses.