arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Kevin Purbhoo.
We give a combinatorial rule for computing intersection numbers on a flag manifold which come from products of Schubert classes pulled back from Grassmannian projections. This rule generalizes the known rule for Grassmannians.
The necessary and sufficient Horn inequalities which determine the non-vanishing Littlewood-Richardson coefficients in the cohomology of a Grassmannian are recursive in that they are naturally indexed by non-vanishing Littlewood-Richardson coefficients on smaller Grassmannians. We show how non-vanishing in the Schubert calculus for cominuscule flag varieties is similarly recursive. For these varieties, the non-vanishing of products of Schubert classes is controlled by the non-vanishing products on smaller cominuscule flag varieties. In particular, we show that the lists of Schubert classes whose product is non-zero naturally correspond to the integer points in the feasibility polytope, which is defined by inequalities coming from non-vanishing products of Schubert classes on smaller cominuscule flag varieties. While the Grassmannian is cominuscule, our necessary and sufficient inequalities are different than the classical Horn inequalities.
We determine the necessary and sufficient combinatorial conditions for which the tensor product of two irreducible polynomial representations of $GL(n,\mathbb{C})$ is isomorphic to another. As a consequence we discover families of Littlewood-Richardson coefficients that are non-zero, and a condition on Schur non-negativity.
We recall the root game, introduced in an earlier paper, which gives a fairly powerful sufficient condition for non-vanishing of Schubert calculus on a generalised flag manifold G/B. We show that it gives a necessary and sufficient rule for non-vanishing of Schubert calculus on Grassmannians. In particular, a Littlewood-Richardson number is non-zero if and only if it is possible to win the corresponding root game. More generally, the rule can be used to determine whether or not a product of several Schubert classes on Gr_l(n) is non-zero in a manifestly symmetric way. Finally, we give a geometric interpretation of root games for Grassmannian Schubert problems.
We define mosaics, which are naturally in bijection with Knutson-Tao puzzles. We define an operation on mosaics, which shows they are also in bijection with Littlewood-Richardson skew-tableaux. Another consequence of this construction is that we obtain bijective proofs of commutativity and associativity for the ring structures defined either of these objects. In particular, we obtain a new, easy proof of the Littlewood-Richardson rule. Finally we discuss how our operation is related to other known constructions, particularly jeu de taquin.
For any complex reductive connected Lie group G, many of the structure constants of the ordinary cohomology ring H^*(G/B; Z) vanish in the Schubert basis, and the rest are strictly positive. We present a combinatorial game, the ``root game'', which provides some criteria for determining which of the Schubert intersection numbers vanish. The definition of the root game is manifestly invariant under automorphisms of G, and under permutations of the classes intersected. Although these criteria are not proven to cover all cases, in practice they work very well, giving a complete answer to the question for G=SL(7,C). In a separate paper we show that one of these criteria is in fact necessary and sufficient when the classes are pulled back from a Grassmannian. More generally If G' -> G is an inclusion of complex reductive connected Lie groups, there is an induced map H^*(G/B) -> H^*(G'/B') on the cohomology of the homogeneous spaces. The image of a Schubert class under this map is a positive sum of Schubert classes on G'/B'. We investigate the problem of determining which Schubert classes appear with non-zero coefficient. This is the vanishing problem for branching Schubert calculus, which plays an important role in representation theory and symplectic geometry, as shown in [Berenstein-Sjamaar 2000]. The root game generalises to give a vanishing criterion and a non-vanishing criterion for this problem.
We examine certain maps from root systems to vector spaces over finite fields. By choosing appropriate bases, the images of these maps can turn out to have nice combinatorial properties, which reflect the structure of the underlying root system. The main examples are E_6 and E_7.
We give a simplification of Belkale's geometric proof of the Horn conjecture. Our approach uses the geometry of two-step flag manifolds to explain the occurrence of the Horn inequalities in a very straightforward way. The arguments for both necessity and sufficiency of the Horn inequalities are fairly conceptual when viewed in this framework. We provide examples to illustrate the method of proof.
A consequence of work of Klyachko and of Knutson-Tao is the Horn recursion to determine when a Littlewood-Richardson coefficient is non-zero. Briefly, a Littlewood-Richardson coefficient is non-zero if and only if it satisfies a collection of Horn inequalities which are indexed by smaller non-zero Littlewood-Richardson coefficients. There are similar Littlewood-Richardson numbers for Schur P- and Q- functions. Using a mixture of combinatorics of root systems, combinatorial linear algebra in Lie algebras, and the geometry of certain cominuscule flag varieties, we give Horn recursions to determine when these other Littlewood-Richardson numbers are non-zero. Our inequalities come from the usual Littlewood-Richardson numbers, and while we give two very different Horn recursions, they have the same sets of solutions. Another combinatorial by-product of this work is a new Horn-type recursion for the usual Littlewood-Richardson coefficients.
The amoeba of an affine algebraic variety V in (C^*)^r is the image of V under the map (z_1, ..., z_r) -> (log|z_1|, ..., log|z_r|). We give a characterisation of the amoeba based on the triangle inequality, which we call testing for lopsidedness. We show that if a point is outside the amoeba of V, there is an element of the defining ideal which witnesses this fact by being lopsided. This condition is necessary and sufficient for amoebas of arbitrary codimension, as well as for compactifications of amoebas inside any toric variety. Our approach naturally leads to methods for approximating hypersurface amoebas and their spines by systems of linear inequalities. Finally, we remark that our main result can be seen a precise analogue of a Nullstellensatz statement for tropical varieties.