arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Mario Kummer.
We classify all matroids with at most 8 elements that have the half-plane property, and we provide a list of some matroids on 9 elements that have, and that do not have the half-plane property. Furthermore, we prove that several classes of matroids and polynomials that are motivated by the theory of semidefinite programming are closed under taking minors and under passing to faces of the Newton polytope.
We study the question whether copies of $S^1$ in $\mathrm{SU}(3)$ can be amalgamated in a compact group. This is the simplest instance of a fundamental open problem in the theory of compact groups raised by George Bergman in 1987. Considerable computational experiments suggest that the answer is positive in this case. We obtain a positive answer for a relaxed problem using theoretical considerations.
Using methods from enriched enumerative geometry, Larson and Vogt gave a signed count of the number of real bitangents to real smooth plane quartics. This signed count depends on a choice of a distinguished line. Larson and Vogt proved that this signed count is bounded below by 0, and they conjectured that the signed count is bounded above by 8. We prove this conjecture using real algebraic geometry, plane geometry, and some properties of convex sets.
We prove that a natural signed count of the $2$-torsion points on a real principally polarized abelian variety $A$ always equals to $2^{g}$ where $g$ is the dimension of $A$. When $A$ is the Jacobian of a real curve we derive signed counts of real odd theta characteristics. These can be interpreted in terms of the extrinsic geometry of contact hyperplanes to the canonical embedding of the curve. We also formulate a conjectural generalization to arbitrary fields in terms of $\mathbb{A}^1$-enumerative geometry.
In this article we develop new methods for exhibiting convex semialgebraic sets that are not spectrahedral shadows. We characterize when the set of nonnegative polynomials with a given support is a spectrahedral shadow in terms of sums of squares. As an application of this result we prove that the cone of copositive matrices of size $n\geq5$ is not a spectrahedral shadow, answering a question of Scheiderer. Our arguments are based on the model theoretic observation that any formula defining a spectrahedral shadow must be preserved by every unital $\mathbb{R}$-linear completely positive map $R\to R$ on a real closed field extension $R$ of $\mathbb{R}$.
We study $\textrm{Sym}(\infty)$-orbit closures of not necessarily closed points in the Zariski spectrum of the infinite polynomial ring $\mathbb{C}[x_{ij}:\, i\in\mathbb{N},\,j\in[n]]$. Among others, we characterize invariant prime ideals in this ring. Furthermore, we study projections of basic equivariant semi-algebraic sets defined by $\textrm{Sym}(\infty)$ orbits of polynomials in $\mathbb{R}[x_{ij}:\, i\in\mathbb{N},\,j\in[n]]$. For $n=1$ we prove a quantifier elimination type result which fails for $n>1$.
A linear principal minor polynomial or lpm polynomial is a linear combination of principal minors of a symmetric matrix. By restricting to the diagonal, lpm polynomials are in bijection to multiaffine polynomials. We show that this establishes a one-to-one correspondence between homogeneous multiaffine stable polynomials and PSD-stable lpm polynomials. This yields new construction techniques for hyperbolic polynomials and allows us to generalize the well-known Fisher--Hadamard and Koteljanskii inequalities from determinants to PSD-stable lpm polynomials. We investigate the relationship between the associated hyperbolicity cones and conjecture a relationship between the eigenvalues of a symmetric matrix and the values of certain lpm polynomials evaluated at that matrix. We refer to this relationship as spectral containment.
Iso-edge domains are a variant of the iso-Delaunay decomposition introduced by Voronoi. They were introduced by Baranovskii & Ryshkov in order to solve the covering problem in dimension $5$. In this work we revisit this decomposition and prove the following new results: $\bullet$ We review the existing theory and give a general mass-formula for the iso-edge domains. $\bullet$ We prove that the associated toroidal compactification of the moduli space of principally polarized abelian varieties is projective. $\bullet$ We prove the Conway--Sloane conjecture in dimension $5$. $\bullet$ We prove that the quadratic forms for which the conorms are non-negative are exactly the matroidal ones in dimension $5$.
Let $X \subset \mathbb{P}^{n}$ be an unramified real curve with $X(\mathbb{R}) \neq \emptyset$. If $n \geq 3$ is odd, Huisman conjectures that $X$ is an $M$-curve and that every branch of $X(\mathbb{R})$ is a pseudo-line. If $n \geq 4$ is even, he conjectures that $X$ is a rational normal curve or a twisted form of a such. We disprove the first conjecture by giving a family of counterexamples. We remark that the second conjecture follows for generic curves of odd degree from the formula enumerating the number of complex inflection points.
To any homogeneous polynomial $h$ we naturally associate a variety $Ω_h$ which maps birationally onto the graph $Γ_h$ of the gradient map $\nabla h$ and which agrees with the space of complete quadrics when $h$ is the determinant of the generic symmetric matrix. We give a sufficient criterion for $Ω_h$ being smooth which applies for example when $h$ is an elementary symmetric polynomial. In this case $Ω_h$ is a smooth toric variety associated to a certain generalized permutohedron. We also give examples when $Ω_h$ is not smooth.
We prove, under a certain representation theoretic assumption, that the set of real symmetric matrices, whose eigenvalues satisfy a linear matrix inequality, is itself a spectrahedron. The main application is that derivative relaxations of the positive semidefinite cone are spectrahedra. From this we further deduce statements on their Wronskians. These imply that Newton's inequalities, as well as a strengthening of the correlation inequalities for hyperbolic polynomials, can be expressed as sums of squares.
We study the structure of the set of algebraic curvature operators satisfying a sectional curvature bound under the light of the emerging field of Convex Algebraic Geometry. More precisely, we determine in which dimensions $n$ this convex semialgebraic set is a spectrahedron or a spectrahedral shadow; in particular, for $n\geq5$, these give new counter-examples to the Helton--Nie Conjecture. Moreover, efficient algorithms are provided if $n=4$ to test membership in such a set. For $n\geq5$, algorithms using semidefinite programming are obtained from hierarchies of inner approximations by spectrahedral shadows and outer relaxations by spectrahedra.
It goes back to Ahlfors that a real algebraic curve admits a real-fibered morphism to the projective line if and only if the real part of the curve disconnects its complex part. Inspired by this result, we are interested in characterising real algebraic varieties of dimension $n$ admitting real-fibered morphisms to the $n$-dimensional projective space. We present a criterion to classify real-fibered morphisms that arise as finite surjective linear projections from an embedded variety which relies on topological linking numbers. We address special attention to real algebraic surfaces. We classify all real-fibered morphisms from real del Pezzo surfaces to the projective plane and determine which such morphisms arise as the composition of a projective embedding with a linear projection. Furthermore, we give some insights in the case of real conic bundles.
In this paper we improve the bounds for the Carathéodory number, especially on algebraic varieties and with small gaps (not all monomials are present). We provide explicit lower and upper bounds on algebraic varieties, $\mathbb{R}^n$, and $[0,1]^n$. We also treat moment problems with small gaps. We find that for every $\varepsilon>0$ and $d\in\mathbb{N}$ there is a $n\in\mathbb{N}$ such that we can construct a moment functional $L:\mathbb{R}[x_1,\dots,x_n]_{\leq d}\rightarrow\mathbb{R}$ which needs at least $(1-\varepsilon)\cdot\left(\begin{smallmatrix} n+d\\ n\end{smallmatrix}\right)$ atoms $l_{x_i}$. Consequences and results for the Hankel matrix and flat extension are gained. We find that there are moment functionals $L:\mathbb{R}[x_1,\dots,x_n]_{\leq 2d}\rightarrow\mathbb{R}$ which need to be extended to the worst case degree $4d$, $\tilde{L}:\mathbb{R}[x_1,\dots,x_n]_{\leq 4d}\rightarrow\mathbb{R}$, in order to have a flat extension.
We classify transversal quintic spectrahedra by the location of 20 nodes on the respective real determinantal surface of degree 5. We identify 65 classes of such surfaces and find an explicit representative in each of them.
We study self-morphisms of smooth real projective algebraic curves that have only real periodic points. In the case of the projective line we provide a convenient characterization of such morphisms. We derive a semialgebraic description of the component of real fibered rational functions all of whose periodic points are real.
We provide a criterion for a coherent sheaf to be an Ulrich sheaf in terms of a certain bilinear form on its global sections. When working over the real numbers we call it a positive Ulrich sheaf if this bilinear form is symmetric or hermitian and positive definite. In that case our result provides a common theoretical framework for several results in real algebraic geometry concerning the existence of algebraic certificates for certain geometric properties. For instance, it implies Hilbert's theorem on nonnegative ternary quartics, via the geometry of del Pezzo surfaces, and the solution of the Lax conjecture on plane hyperbolic curves due to Helton and Vinnikov.
We relate the geometry of curves to the notion of hyperbolicity in real algebraic geometry. A hyperbolic variety is a real algebraic variety that (in particular) admits a real fibered morphism to a projective space whose dimension is equal to the dimension of the variety. We study hyperbolic varieties with a special interest in the case of hypersurfaces that admit a real algebraic ruling. The central part of the paper is concerned with secant varieties of real algebraic curves where the real locus has the maximal number of connected components, which is determined by the genus of the curve. For elliptic normal curves, we further obtain definite symmetric determinantal representations for the hyperbolic secant hypersurfaces, which implies the existence of symmetric Ulrich sheaves of rank one on these hypersurfaces.