NP-hardness of polytope M-matrix testing and related problems

In this note we prove NP-hardness of the following problem: Given a set of matrices, is there a convex combination of those that is a nonsingular M-matrix? Via known characterizations of M-matrices, our result establishes NP-hardness of several fundamental problems in systems analysis and control, such as testing the instability of an uncertain dynamical system, and minimizing the spectral radius of an affine matrix function.