Finite metric spaces arise in many different contexts. Enormous bodies of data, scientific, commercial and others can often be viewed as large metric spaces. It turns out that the metric of graphs reveals a lot of interesting information. Metric spaces also come up in many recent advances in the theory of algorithms. Finally, finite submetrics of classical geometric objects such as normed spaces or manifolds reflect many important properties of the underlying structure. In this paper we review some of the recent advances in this area.
In this expository article we give an introduction to Ehrhart theory, i.e., the theory of integer points in polyhedra, and take a tour through its applications in enumerative combinatorics. Topics include geometric modeling in combinatorics, Ehrhart's method for proving that a couting function is a polynomial, the connection between polyhedral cones, rational functions and quasisymmetric functions, methods for bounding coefficients, combinatorial reciprocity theorems, algorithms for counting integer points in polyhedra and computing rational function representations, as well as visualizations …
Frieze patterns of numbers, introduced in the early 70's by Coxeter, are currently attracting much interest due to connections with the recent theory of cluster algebras. The present paper aims to review the original work of Coxeter and the new developments around the notion of frieze, focusing on the representation theoretic, geometric and combinatorial approaches.
This is a survey of recent developments in combinatorics. The goal is to give a big picture of its many interactions with other areas of mathematics, such as: group theory, representation theory, commutative algebra, geometry (including algebraic geometry), topology, probability theory, and theoretical computer science.
A transportation polytope consists of all multidimensional arrays or tables of non-negative real numbers that satisfy certain sum conditions on subsets of the entries. They arise naturally in optimization and statistics, and also have interest for discrete mathematics because permutation matrices, latin squares, and magic squares appear naturally as lattice points of these polytopes. In this paper we survey advances on the understanding of the combinatorics and geometry of these polyhedra and include some recent unpublished results on the diameter of graphs of these polytopes. In particular, t…
We explain connections among several, a priori unrelated, areas of mathematics: combinatorics, algebraic statistics, topology and enumerative algebraic geometry. Our focus is on discrete invariants, strongly related to the theory of Lorentzian polynomials. The main concept joining the mentioned fields is a linear space of matrices.
Gamma-positivity is an elementary property that polynomials with symmetric coefficients may have, which directly implies their unimodality. The idea behind it stems from work of Foata, Schützenberger and Strehl on the Eulerian polynomials; it was revived independently by Brändén and Gal in the course of their study of poset Eulerian polynomials and face enumeration of flag simplicial spheres, respectively, and has found numerous applications since then. This paper surveys some of the main results and open problems on gamma-positivity, appearing in various combinatorial or geometric contexts, a…
We present several direct bijections between different combinatorial interpretations of the Littlewood-Richardson coefficients. The bijections are defined by explicit linear maps which have other applications.
An $r$-segment hypergraph $H$ is a hypergraph whose edges consist of $r$ consecutive integer points on line segments in $\mathbb{R}^2$. In this paper, we bound the chromatic number $χ(H)$ and covering number $τ(H)$ of hypergraphs in this family, uncovering several interesting geometric properties in the process. We conjecture that for $r \ge 3$, the covering number $τ(H)$ is at most $(r - 1)ν(H)$, where $ν(H)$ denotes the matching number of $H$. We prove our conjecture in the case where $ν(H) = 1$, and provide improved (in fact, optimal) bounds on $τ(H)$ for $r \le 5$. We also provide sharp bo…
This chapter combines an introduction and research survey about Schubert varieties. The theme is to combinatorially classify their singularities using a family of polynomial ideals generated by determinants.
We give an alternative, combinatorial/geometrical evaluation of a class of improper sinc integrals studied by the Borweins. A probabilistic interpretation is also noted and used to shed light on a related combinatorial identity.
We describe the canonical correspondence between set of all finite metric spaces and set of special symmetric convex polytopes, and formulate the problem about classification of the metric spaces in terms of combinatorial structure of those polytopes.
This survey paper describes Springer fibers, which are used in one of the earliest examples of a geometric representation. We will compare and contrast them with Schubert varieties, another family of subvarieties of the flag variety that play an important role in representation theory and combinatorics, but whose geometry is in many respects simpler. The end of the paper describes a way that Springer fibers and Schubert varieties are related, as well as open questions.
We survey the relationship between the combinatorics and geometry of graphs and the algebraic structure of right-angled Artin groups. We concentrate on the defining graph of the right-angled Artin group and on the extension graph associated to the right-angled Artin group. Additionally, we discuss connections to geometric group theory and complexity theory. The final version of this survey will appear in "In the tradition of Thurston, vol.~II", ed.~K.~Ohshika and A.~Papadopoulos.
In this thesis manuscript we explore different facets of random tensor models. These models have been introduced to mimic the incredible successes of random matrix models in physics, mathematics and combinatorics. After giving a very short introduction to few aspects of random matrix models and recalling a physical motivation called Group Field Theory, we start exploring the world of random tensor models and its relation to geometry, quantum gravity and combinatorics. We first define these models in a natural way and discuss their geometry and combinatorics. After these first explorations we s…
Convex neural codes are combinatorial structures describing the intersection pattern of a collection of convex sets. Inductively pierced codes are a particularly nice subclass of neural codes introduced in the information visualization literature by Stapleton et al. in 2011 and to the convex codes literature by Gross et al. in 2016. Here, we show that all inductively pierced codes are nondegenerate convex codes and nondegenerate hyperplane codes. In particular, we prove that a $k$-inductively pierced code on $n$ neurons has a convex realization with balls in $\mathbb R^{k+1}$ and with half spa…
We suggest a new definition for discrete minimal surfaces in terms of sphere packings with orthogonally intersecting circles. These discrete minimal surfaces can be constructed from Schramm's circle patterns. We present a variational principle which allows us to construct discrete analogues of some classical minimal surfaces. The data used for the construction are purely combinatorial--the combinatorics of the curvature line pattern. A Weierstrass-type representation and an associated family are derived. We show the convergence to continuous minimal surfaces.
Arithmetic combinatorics is often concerned with the problem of bounding the behaviour of arbitrary finite sets in a group or ring with respect to arithmetic operations such as addition or multiplication. Similarly, combinatorial geometry is often concerned with the problem of bounding the behaviour of arbitrary finite collections of geometric objects such as points, lines, or circles with respect to geometric operations such as incidence or distance. Given the presence of arbitrary finite sets in these problems, the methods used to attack these problems have primarily been combinatorial in na…
A higher level analog of Weyl modules over multi-variable currents is proposed. It is shown that the sum of their dual spaces form a commutative algebra. The structure of these modules and the geometry of the projective spectrum of this algebra is studied for the currents of dimension one and two. Along the way we prove some particular cases of the conjectures in [FL1] and propose a generalization of the notion of parking function representations.
We study outer Lipschitz geometry of real semialgebraic or, more general, definable in a polynomially bounded o-minimal structure over the reals, surface germs. In particular, any definable Hölder triangle is either Lipschitz normally embedded or contains some "abnormal" arcs. We show that abnormal arcs constitute finitely many "abnormal zones" in the space of all arcs, and investigate geometric and combinatorial properties of abnormal surface germs. We establish a strong relation between geometry and combinatorics of abnormal Hölder triangles.
We investigate ideals in a polynomial ring which are generated by powers of linear forms. Such ideals are closely related to the theories of fat point ideals, Cox rings, and box splines. We pay special attention to a family of power ideals that arises naturally from a hyperplane arrangement A. We prove that their Hilbert series are determined by the combinatorics of A, and can be computed from its Tutte polynomial. We also obtain formulas for the Hilbert series of the resulting fat point ideals and zonotopal Cox rings. Our work unifies and generalizes results due to Dahmen-Micchelli, Holtz-Ron…
Wilson loop diagrams are an important tool in studying scattering amplitudes of SYM $N=4$ theory and are known by previous work to be associated to positroids. We characterize the conditions under which two Wilson loop diagrams give the same positroid, prove that an important subclass of subdiagrams (exact subdiagrams) correspond to uniform matroids, and enumerate the number of different Wilson loop diagrams that correspond to each positroid cell. We also give a correspondence between those positroids which can arise from Wilson loop diagrams and directions in associahedra.
For a finite Coxeter system and a subset of its diagram nodes, we define spherical elements (a generalization of Coxeter elements). Conjecturally, for Weyl groups, spherical elements index Schubert varieties in a flag manifold G/B that are spherical for the action of a Levi subgroup. We evidence the conjecture, employing the combinatorics of Demazure modules, and work of R. Avdeev-A. Petukhov, M. Can-R. Hodges, R. Hodges-V. Lakshmibai, P. Karuppuchamy, P. Magyar-J. Weyman-A. Zelevinsky, N. Perrin, J. Stembridge, and B. Tenner. In type A, we establish connections with the key polynomials of A. …
Let $ρ$ be a metric on the set $X=\{1,2,\dots,n+1\}$. Consider the $n$-dimensional polytope of functions $f:X\rightarrow \mathbb{R}$, which satisfy the conditions $f(n+1)=0$, $|f(x)-f(y)|\leq ρ(x,y)$. The question on classifying metrics depending on the combinatorics of this polytope have been recently posed by A. M. Vershik \cite{V}. We prove that for any "generic" metric the number of $(n-m)$-dimensional faces, $0\leq m\leq n$, equals $\binom{n+m}{m,m,n-m}=(n+m)!/m!m!(n-m)!$. This fact is intimately related to regular triangulations of the root polytope (the convex hull of the roots of $A_n$…
The classical Schur polynomials form a natural basis for the ring of symmetric polynomials, and have geometric significance since they represent the Schubert classes in the cohomology ring of Grassmannians. Moreover, these polynomials enjoy rich combinatorial properties. In the last decade, an exact analogue of this picture has emerged in the symplectic and orthogonal Lie types, with the Schur polynomials replaced by the theta and eta polynomials of Buch, Kresch, and the author. This expository paper gives an overview of what is known to date about this correspondence, with examples.
We survey geometrical and especially combinatorial aspects of generalized Donaldson-Thomas invariants (also called BPS invariants) for toric Calabi-Yau manifolds, emphasizing the role of plane partitions and their generalizations in the recently proposed crystal melting model. We also comment on equivalence with a vicious walker model and the matrix model representation of the partition function.
Wilson loop diagrams are an important tool in studying scattering amplitudes of SYM $N=4$ theory and are known by previous work to be associated to positroids. In this paper we study the structure of the associated positroids, as well as the structure of the denominator of the integrand defined by each diagram. We give an algorithm to derive the Grassmann necklace of the associated positroid directly from the Wilson loop diagram, and a recursive proof that the dimension of these cells is thrice the number of propagators in the diagram. We also show that the ideal generated by the denominator i…
In this paper we define and study a ring associated to a graph that we call the cographic toric face ring, or simply the cographic ring. The cographic ring is the toric face ring defined by the following equivalent combinatorial structures of a graph: the cographic arrangement of hyperplanes, the Voronoi polytope, and the poset of totally cyclic orientations. We describe the properties of the cographic ring and, in particular, relate the invariants of the ring to the invariants of the corresponding graph. Our study of the cographic ring fits into a body of work on describing rings constructed …
Squaregraphs were originally defined as finite plane graphs in which all inner faces are quadrilaterals (i.e., 4-cycles) and all inner vertices (i.e., the vertices not incident with the outer face) have degrees larger than three. The planar dual of a finite squaregraph is determined by a triangle-free chord diagram of the unit disk, which could alternatively be viewed as a triangle-free line arrangement in the hyperbolic plane. This representation carries over to infinite plane graphs with finite vertex degrees in which the balls are finite squaregraphs. Algebraically, finite squaregraphs are …
The interaction between combinatorics and algebraic and differential geometry is very strong. While researching a problem of Hessian topology, we came across a series of identities of binomial coefficients, which are useful for proving a topological property of certain spaces whose elements are graphs of a class of hyperbolic polynomials. These identities are proven by different methods in combinatorics.
We show that the cophylogenetic distance, k-interval cospeciation, is distinct from other metrics and accounts for global congruence between locally incongruent trees. The growth of the neighborhood of trees which satisfy the largest possible k-interval cospeciation with a given tree indicates that k-interval cospeciation is useful for analyzing simulated data.
This paper is a study of the interaction between the combinatorics of boundaries of convex polytopes in arbitrary dimension and their metric geometry. Let S be the boundary of a convex polytope of dimension d+1, or more generally let S be a `convex polyhedral pseudomanifold'. We prove that S has a polyhedral nonoverlapping unfolding into R^d, so the metric space S is obtained from a closed (usually nonconvex) polyhedral ball in R^d by identifying pairs of boundary faces isometrically. Our existence proof exploits geodesic flow away from a source point v in S, which is the exponential map to S …
We discuss three distinct topics of independent interest; one in enumerative combinatorics, one in symmetric function theory, and one in algebraic geometry. The topic in enumerative combinatorics concerns a q-analog of a generalization of the Eulerian polynomials, the one in symmetric function theory deals with a refinement of the chromatic symmetric functions of Stanley, and the one in algebraic geometry deals with Tymoczko's representation of the symmetric group on the cohomology of the regular semisimple Hessenberg variety of type A. Our purpose is to explore some remarkable connections bet…
In this expository paper we describe a powerful combinatorial formula and its implications in geometry, topology, and algebra. This formula first appeared in the appendix of a book by Andersen, Jantzen, and Soergel. Sara Billey discovered it independently five years later, and it played a prominent role in her work to evaluate certain polynomials closely related to Schubert polynomials. Billey's formula relates many pieces of Schubert calculus: the geometry of Schubert varieties, the action of the torus on the flag variety, combinatorial data about permutations, the cohomology of the flag vari…
There are many different algebraic, geometric and combinatorial objects that one can attach to a complex polynomial with distinct roots. In this article we introduce a new object that encodes many of the existing objects that have previously appeared in the literature. Concretely, for every complex polynomial $p$ with $d$ distinct roots and degree at least 2, we produce a canonical compact planar 2-complex that is a compact metric version of a tiled phase diagram. It has a locally CAT(0) metric that is locally Euclidean away from a finite set of interior points indexed by the critical points o…
George Birkhoff proved in 1912 that the number of proper colorings of a finite graph G with n colors is a polynomial in n, called the chromatic polynomial of G. Read conjectured in 1968 that for any graph G, the sequence of absolute values of coefficients of the chromatic polynomial is unimodal: it goes up, hits a peak, and then goes down. Read's conjecture was proved by June Huh in a 2012 paper making heavy use of methods from algebraic geometry. Huh's result was subsequently refined and generalized by Huh and Katz, again using substantial doses of algebraic geometry. Both papers in fact esta…
We introduce a general class of regular weight functions on finite abelian groups, and study the combinatorics, the duality theory, and the metric properties of codes endowed with such functions. The weights are obtained by composing a suitable support map with the rank function of a graded lattice satisfying certain regularity properties. A regular weight on a group canonically induces a regular weight on the character group, and invertible MacWilliams identities always hold for such a pair of weights. Moreover, the Krawtchouk coefficients of the corresponding MacWilliams transformation have …
The face poset of the permutohedron realizes the combinatorics of linearly ordered partitions of the set $[n]=\{1,...,n\}$. Similarly, the cyclopermutohedron is a virtual polytope that realizes the combinatorics of cyclically ordered partitions of the set $[n+1]$. The cyclopermutohedron was introduced by the third author by motivations coming from configuration spaces of polygonal linkages. In the paper we prove two facts: (1) the volume of the cyclopermutohedron equals zero, and (2) the homology groups $H_k$ for $k=0,...,n-2$ of the face poset of the cyclopermutohedron are non-zero free abeli…
Using standard techniques from combinatorics, model theory, and algebraic geometry, we prove generalized versions of several basic results in the theory of spectrally arbitrary matrix patterns. Also, we point out a counterexample to a conjecture proposed recently by McDonald and Melvin.
Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences（马克斯·普朗克科学促进学会数学研究所）；Institute for Advanced Study, Massey University（梅西大学高等研究院）；Department of Mathematics, The University of Auckland（奥克兰大学数学系）
Hypertoric varieties are quaternionic analogues of toric varieties, important for their interaction with the combinatorics of matroids as well as for their prominent place in the rapidly expanding field of algebraic symplectic and hyperkahler geometry. The aim of this survey is to give clear definitions and statements of known results, serving both as a reference and as a point of entry to this beautiful subject.
In this note we give a(nother) combinatorial proof of an old result of Baik--Rains: that for appropriately considered independent geometric weights, the generating series for last passage percolation polymers in a $2n \times n \times n$ quarter square (point-to-half-line-reflected geometry) splits as the product of two simpler generating series---that for last passage percolation polymers in a point-to-line geometry and that for last passage percolation in a point-to-point-reflected (half-space) geometry, the latter both in an $n \times n \times n$ triangle. As a corollary, for iid geometric r…
This article discusses the design of the Apprenticeship Program at the Fields Institute, held 21 August - 3 September 2016. Six themes from combinatorial algebraic geometry were selected for the two weeks: curves, surfaces, Grassmannians, convexity, abelian combinatorics, parameters and moduli. The activities were structured into fitness, research and scholarship. Combinatorics and concrete computations with polynomials (and theta functions) empowers young scholars in algebraic geometry, and it helps them to connect with the historic roots of their field. We illustrate our perspective for the …
We study the classification of ultrametric spaces based on their small scale geometry (uniform homeomorphism), large scale geometry (coarse equivalence) and both (all scale uniform equivalences). We prove that these equivalences can be characterized with parallel constructions using a combinatoric tool called common zig-zag chain.
This paper is a combinatorial and computational study of the moduli space of tropical curves of genus g, the moduli space of principally polarized tropical abelian varieties, and the tropical Torelli map. These objects were introduced recently by Brannetti, Melo, and Viviani. Here, we give a new definition of the category of stacky fans, of which the aforementioned moduli spaces are objects and the Torelli map is a morphism. We compute the poset of cells of tropical M_g and of the tropical Schottky locus for genus at most 5. We show that tropical A_g is Hausdorff, and we also construct a finit…
In recent years it has been noted that a number of combinatorial structures such as real and complex hyperplane arrangements, interval greedoids, matroids and oriented matroids have the structure of a finite monoid called a left regular band. Random walks on the monoid model a number of interesting Markov chains such as the Tsetlin library and riffle shuffle. The representation theory of left regular bands then comes into play and has had a major influence on both the combinatorics and the probability theory associated to such structures. In a recent paper, the authors established a close conn…
The theory of matroids or combinatorial geometries originated in linear algebra and graph theory, and has deep connections with many other areas, including field theory, matching theory, submodular optimization, Lie combinatorics, and total positivity. Matroids capture the combinatorial essence that these different settings share. In recent years, the (classical, polyhedral, algebraic, and tropical) geometric roots of the field have grown much deeper, bearing new fruits. We survey some recent successes, stemming from three geometric models of a matroid: the matroid polytope, the Bergman fan, a…
Université Gustave Eiffel（古斯塔夫·埃菲尔大学）；ESIEE Paris（巴黎高等电子与电工技术工程师学院）；Université Sorbonne Paris Nord（巴黎索邦北大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）
The fundamental result of Li, Long, and Srinivasan on approximations of set systems has become a key tool across several communities such as learning theory, algorithms, computational geometry, combinatorics and data analysis. The goal of this paper is to give a modular, self-contained, intuitive proof of this result for finite set systems. The only ingredient we assume is the standard Chernoff's concentration bound. This makes the proof accessible to a wider audience, readers not familiar with techniques from statistical learning theory, and makes it possible to be covered in a single self-co…
