arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Botong Wang.
We construct morphisms between smooth complex projective varieties that have singular fibers, but look topologically smooth. We use this to give negative answers to the following four conjectures and questions: the smoothness conjecture of Fern\'andez~de~Bobadilla and Koll\'ar, a question of Koll\'ar and Pardon on universal covers, Kotschick's conjecture on 1-forms, and a conjecture of Schreieder on Aomoto complexes.
We construct a smooth complex projective variety whose Albanese morphism is a homotopy fiber bundle but not a submersion. The same variety fibers smoothly over the circle, although every holomorphic one-form on it has a zero. A second construction yields smooth complex projective varieties $X$ such that the Aomoto complex of every nonzero holomorphic one-form on every connected finite \'etale cover of $X$ is exact, while $X$ admits no real closed one-form without zeros. The two constructions build, respectively, on a homology fiber bundle of Corr\^ea--Koll\'ar that is not a homotopy fiber bundle and on a rational cohomology torus constructed by Debarre--Jiang--Lahoz. Consequently, we disprove Kotschick's conjecture, the remaining implication in the Bobadilla--Koll\'ar conjecture, and a conjecture of the first-named author.
Motivated by algebraic correspondences and linear operators associated with volume and Lorentzian polynomials, we introduce matroid correspondences and their polymatroid analogues. A matroid correspondence defines a functor between poset categories of matroids whose morphisms are matroid quotients, and various standard functors, including deletion, contraction, free extension, truncation, intersection, union, and pullback, arise in this way. We show that these correspondences preserve representability and algebraicity under natural hypotheses. In the polymatroid setting, we establish compatibility with multisymmetric lifts. Finally, we relate this construction to the supports of linear operators with Lorentzian symbols.
We study Euler characteristics of tropical subvarieties of tropical abelian varieties. We prove that every H-regular subvariety, locally modeled on tropicalizations of sufficiently well-behaved very affine varieties, has nonnegative signed Euler characteristic. This gives a tropical analogue of a theorem of Green-Lazarsfeld for subvarieties of complex abelian varieties. The main input is a local vanishing theorem for H-regular tropical fans, which also yields a Lefschetz-type theorem for affine H-regular tropical varieties. We further show that the signed Euler characteristic inequality fails for general tropical subvarieties of tropical abelian varieties, and we construct a 3-dimensional tropical fan whose link is not homotopy equivalent to a bouquet of 2-spheres.
The unit Euclidean distance degree and the generic Euclidean distance degree are two well-studied invariants of projective varieties. These quantities measure the algebraic complexity of nearest-point problems on a variety, and in many examples arising in optimization, engineering, statistics, and data science, there is a significant gap between them. We refer to this difference as the defect of the Euclidean distance (ED) degree. In this paper, we provide a constructible enhancement and a topological formula for the defect of the ED degree of an arbitrary complex projective variety, extending our previous results from the smooth setting. Since the generic Euclidean distance degree is typically more tractable, our approach offers a new method for computing ED degrees in broad generality.
Let $P\subset\mathbb R^n$ be a convex polytope and let $\ell$ be a linear functional which is nonconstant on every edge of $P$. The induced acyclic orientation determines positive and negative Bia{\l}ynicki-Birula type partitions of $P$ into unions of relative interiors of faces. Our first result establishes a duality: the positive partition is a stratification if and only if the negative one is a stratification. Our second result connects poset invariants with monotone path polytopes. Assuming the induced vertex relation admits the structure of a graded poset, we prove that the Chow polynomial of the resulting vertex poset agrees with the $h$-polynomial of a (dual) monotone path polytope.
We show that a set function $\nu$ satisfies the gross substitutes property if and only if its homogeneous generating polynomial $Z_{q,\nu}$ is a Lorentzian polynomial for all positive $q \le 1$, answering a question of Eur-Huh. We achieve this by giving a rank 1 upper bound for the distance matrix of an ultrametric tree, refining a classical result of Graham-Pollak. This characterization enables us to resolve two open problems that strengthen Mason's log-concavity conjectures for the number of independent sets of a matroid: one posed by Giansiracusa-Rinc\'on-Schleis-Ulirsch for valuated matroids, and two posed by Dowling in 1980 and Zhao in 1985 for ordinary matroids.
We revisit the equivariant spectral sequence considered by Papadima-Suciu, and show that all its differentials are computed by higher order Massey products. As a first application, we extend to arbitrary field coefficients results of Pajitnov relating the size of Jordan blocks for the eigenvalue 1 part of the Alexander modules to the length of nonvanishing Massey products in cohomology. We also give computable upper bounds for the mod p Betti numbers of prime power cyclic covers, and resp. for the ranks of the cohomology groups with coefficients in a prime order rank one local system. Under suitable conditions, these bounds are improvements of the ones obtained by Papadima-Suciu. We also specialize these results to the case of hyperplane arrangement complements, showing, e.g., that vanishing of higher-order Massey products implies that the mod p Betti numbers of prime p tower cyclic covers are combinatorially determined.
We show that the Betti numbers of a local system on the complement of an essential complex hyperplane arrangement are maximized precisely when the local system is constant. This result answers positively a recent question of Yoshinaga and the first author.
We study multiplicative inequalities among entries of Lorentzian matrices, referred to as bounded ratios. These inequalities can be viewed as generalizations of the classical Alexandrov--Fenchel inequalities for mixed volumes. Our main structural result identifies the cone of all bounded ratios on Lorentzian matrices with the dual of the cut cone, a finitely generated integral polyhedral cone extensively studied in metric geometry and graph theory. We examine in detail the pentagonal ratio, which first appears for Lorentzian matrices of size at least five. For Lorentzian matrices of size three, we determine the optimal bounding constants across the entire cone of bounded ratios, obtaining an explicit entropy-like formula. We conjecture that any normalized bounded ratio is, in fact, bounded by 2.
Volume polynomials measure the growth of Minkowski sums of convex bodies and of tensor powers of positive line bundles on projective varieties. We show that Aluffi's covolume polynomials are precisely the polynomial differential operators that preserve volume polynomials, reflecting a duality between homology and cohomology. We then present several applications to matroid theory.
The relationship between convex geometry and algebraic geometry has deep historical roots, tracing back to classical works in enumerative geometry. In this paper, we continue this theme by studying two interconnected problems regarding projections of geometric objects in four-dimensional spaces: (1) Let $A$ be a convex body in $\mathbb{R}^4$, and let $(p_{12}, p_{13}, p_{14}, p_{23}, p_{24}, p_{34})$ be the areas of the six coordinate projections of $A$ in $\mathbb{R}^2$. Which tuples of six nonnegative real numbers can arise in this way? (2) Let $S$ be an irreducible surface in $(\mathbb{P}^1)^4$, and let $(p_{12}, p_{13}, p_{14}, p_{23}, p_{24}, p_{34})$ be the degrees of the six coordinate projections from $S$ to $(\mathbb{P}^1)^2$. Which tuples of six nonnegative integers can arise in this way? We show that these questions are governed by the Pl\"ucker relations for the Grassmannian $\text{Gr}(2,4)$ over the triangular hyperfield $\mathbb{T}_2$. We extend our analysis by determining the homology classes in $(\mathbb{P}^m)^n$ proportional to the fundamental classes of irreducible algebraic surfaces, resolving the algebraic Steenrod problem in this setting. Our results lead to several conjectures on realizable homology classes in smooth projective varieties and on the projection volumes of convex bodies.
In 2001, de Oliveira, Katzarkov, and Ramachandran conjectured that the property of smooth projective varieties having big fundamental groups is stable under small deformations. This conjecture was proven by Beno\^it Claudon in 2010 for surfaces and for threefolds under suitable assumptions. In this paper, we prove this conjecture for smooth projective varieties admitting a big complex local system. Moreover, we address a more general conjecture by Campana and Claudon concerning the deformation invariance of the \(\Gamma\)-dimension of projective varieties. As an application, we establish the deformation openness of pseudo-Brody hyperbolicity for projective varieties endowed with a big and semisimple complex local system. To achieve these results, we develop the deformation regularity of equivariant pluriharmonic maps into Euclidean buildings and Riemannian symmetric spaces in families, along with techniques from the reductive and linear Shafarevich conjectures.
The lattice of flats $\mathcal L_M$ of a matroid $M$ is combinatorially well-behaved and, when $M$ is realizable, admits a geometric model in the form of a "Schubert variety of hyperplane arrangement". In contrast, the lattice of flats of a polymatroid exhibits many combinatorial pathologies and admits no similar geometric model. We address this situation by defining the lattice $\mathcal L_P$ of "combinatorial flats" of a polymatroid $P$. Combinatorially, $\mathcal L_P$ exhibits good behavior analogous to that of $\mathcal L_M$: it is graded, determines $P$ when $P$ is simple, and is top-heavy. When $P$ is realizable over a field of characteristic 0, we show that $\mathcal L_P$ is modeled by "the Schubert variety of a subspace arrangement". Our work generalizes a number of results of Ardila-Boocher and Huh-Wang on Schubert varieties of hyperplane arrangements; however, the geometry of Schubert varieties of subspace arrangements is noticeably more complicated than that of Schubert varieties of hyperplane arrangements. Many natural questions remain open.
In 1995, Koll\'ar conjectured that a smooth complex projective $n$-fold $X$ with generically large fundamental group has Euler characteristic $\chi(X, K_X)\geq 0$. In this paper, we prove the conjecture assuming $X$ has linear fundamental group, i.e., there exists a representation $\pi_1(X)\to {\rm GL}_N(\mathbb{C})$ with finite kernel. We deduce the conjecture by proving a stronger $L^2$ vanishing theorem: for the universal cover $\widetilde{X}$ of such $X$, its $L^2$-Dolbeault cohomology $H_{(2)}^{n,q}(\widetilde{X})=0$ for $q\neq 0$. The main ingredients of the proof are techniques from the linear Shafarevich conjecture along with some analytic methods.
If $X$ is a closed $2n$-dimensional aspherical manifold, i.e., the universal cover of $X$ is contractible, then the Chern-Hopf-Thurston conjecture predicts that $(-1)^n\chi(X)\geq 0$. We prove this conjecture when $X$ is a complex projective manifold whose fundamental group admits an almost faithful linear representation over any field. In fact, we prove a much stronger statement that if $X$ is a complex projective manifold with large fundamental group and $\pi_1(X)$ admits an almost faithful linear representation, then $\chi(X, \mathcal{P})\geq 0$ for any perverse sheaf $\mathcal{P}$ on $X$. To prove this, we introduce a vanishing cycle functor of multivalued one-forms and apply techniques from non-abelian Hodge theory, both in archimedean and non-archimedean settings. These techniques allow us to deduce the desired positivity from the geometric properties of pure and mixed period maps.
We propose several Hodge theoretic analogues of the conjectures of Hopf and Singer, and prove them in some special cases.
Using the Brylinski-Radon transformation, we prove that under a generic surjective linear map from C^n to C^m, the pushforward of a perverse sheaf is perverse, modulo shifts of constant sheaves.