  This paper deals with the computational complexity of conditions which
guarantee that the NP-hard problem of finding the sparsest solution to an
underdetermined linear system can be solved by efficient algorithms. In the
literature, several such conditions have been introduced. The most well-known
ones are the mutual coherence, the restricted isometry property (RIP), and the
nullspace property (NSP). While evaluating the mutual coherence of a given
matrix is easy, it has been suspected for some time that evaluating RIP and NSP
is computationally intractable in general. We confirm these conjectures by
showing that for a given matrix A and positive integer k, computing the best
constants for which the RIP or NSP hold is, in general, NP-hard. These results
are based on the fact that determining the spark of a matrix is NP-hard, which
is also established in this paper. Furthermore, we also give several complexity
statements about problems related to the above concepts.
