We study the minimal normal completion problem: given A ∈ Cn×n, how do we find an (n+q)×(n+q) normal matrix Aext := ( A A12 A21 A22 ) of smallest possible size? We will show that this smallest number q of rows and columns we need to add, called the normal defect of A, satisfies nd(A) ≥ max{i−(AA∗ −A∗A), i+(AA∗ −A∗A)}, where i±(M) denotes the number of positive and negative eigenvalues of the He...