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Ursula Whitcher

Publications and source records attributed to Ursula Whitcher.

17 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2025

Hypergeometric decomposition of Delsarte K3 pencils

We study five pencils of projective quartic Delsarte K3 surfaces. Over finite fields, we give explicit formulas for the point counts of each family, written in terms of hypergeometric sums. Over the complex numbers, we match the periods of the corresponding family with hypergeometric differential operators and series. We also obtain a decomposition of the $L$-function of each pencil in terms of hypergeometric $L$-series and Dedekind zeta functions. This gives an explicit description of the hypergeometric motives geometrically realised by each pencil.

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arXiv2024

Deformations of highly symmetric Calabi-Yau Grassmannian hypersurfaces

We use arithmetic and Hodge-theoretic techniques to study pencils of Calabi-Yau varieties realized as highly symmetric hypersurfaces in Grassmannians and their quotients, demonstrating that their geometric properties are distinct from the classical mirrors of Calabi-Yau Grassmannian hypersurfaces.

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arXiv2022

Mirror constructions for K3 surfaces from bimodal singularities

We study lattice polarizations of five exceptional pairs of families of K3 surfaces obtained via compactifications of strange dual pairs of bimodal singularities. We show that the polarizations induced by embedding these paired families in paired toric varieties obtained from polar dual reflexive polytopes cannot be mirror lattices and identify mirror sublattices.

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arXiv2021

Branch cuts: writing, editing, and ramified complexities

As I was preparing my tenure application, the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents voted to redefine tenure, removing many of the institution's historical protections. Reevaluating my career priorities in light of these changes and a resurgent two-body problem, I recognized that my fundamental goal was communicating mathematical ideas. I found a new role as an editor at Mathematical Reviews, part of the American Mathematical Society. To my surprise, thinking more about my identity as a writer and editor also changed my perspective on my own sexuality and gender identity, inspiring new approaches to leadership.

math.HO↗
arXiv2020

Hasse--Witt matrices and mirror toric pencils

Mirror symmetry suggests unexpected relationships between arithmetic properties of distinct families of algebraic varieties. For example, Wan and others have shown that for some mirror pairs, the number of rational points over a finite field matches modulo the order of the field. In this paper, we obtain a similar result for certain mirror pairs of toric hypersurfaces. We use recent results by Huang, Lian, Yau and Yu describing the relationship between the Picard-Fuchs equations of these varieties and their Hasse--Witt matrices, which encapsulate information about the number of points. The result allows us to compute the number of points modulo the order of the field explicitly. We illustrate this by computing K3 surface examples related to hypergeometric functions.

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arXiv2020

Hypergeometric decomposition of symmetric K3 quartic pencils

We study the hypergeometric functions associated to five one-parameter deformations of Delsarte K3 quartic hypersurfaces in projective space. We compute all of their Picard--Fuchs differential equations; we count points using Gauss sums and rewrite this in terms of finite field hypergeometric sums; then we match up each differential equation to a factor of the zeta function, and we write this in terms of global L-functions. This computation gives a complete, explicit description of the motives for these pencils in terms of hypergeometric motives.

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arXiv2018

Zeta functions of alternate mirror Calabi-Yau families

We prove that if two Calabi-Yau invertible pencils have the same dual weights, then they share a common factor in their zeta functions. By using Dwork cohomology, we demonstrate that this common factor is related to a hypergeometric Picard--Fuchs differential equation. The factor in the zeta function is defined over the rationals and has degree at least the order of the Picard--Fuchs equation. As an application, we relate several pencils of K3 surfaces to the Dwork pencil, obtaining new cases of arithmetic mirror symmetry.

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arXiv2017

Reflexive Polytopes and Lattice-Polarized K3 Surfaces

In this expository note, we review the standard formulation of mirror symmetry for Calabi-Yau hypersurfaces in toric varieties, and compare this construction to a description of mirror symmetry for K3 surfaces which relies on a sublattice of the Picard lattice. We then show how to combine information about the Picard group of a toric ambient space with data about automorphisms of the toric variety to identify families of K3 surfaces with high Picard rank.

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arXiv2017

Women's Representation in Mathematics Subfields: Evidence from the arXiv

We use data from papers posted to the Mathematics section of the arXiv to explore the representation of women in mathematics research. We show that women are under-represented as authors of mathematics papers on the arXiv, even in comparison to the proportion of women who hold full-time positions in mathematics departments. However, some subfields have much greater participation than others.

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arXiv2016

Strong arithmetic mirror symmetry and toric isogenies

We say a mirror pair of Calabi-Yau varieties exhibits strong arithmetic mirror symmetry if the number of points on each variety over a finite field is equivalent, modulo the order of that field. We search for strong mirror symmetry in pencils of toric hypersurfaces generated using polar dual pairs of reflexive polytopes. We characterize the pencils of elliptic curves where strong arithmetic mirror symmetry arises, and provide experimental evidence that the phenomenon generalizes to higher dimensions. We also provide experimental evidence that pencils of K3 surfaces with the same Picard-Fuchs equation have related point counts.

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arXiv2016

Beyond the black box

We describe the role the open-source software community plays in fixing bugs through a case study of a problem with integer determinant computations in SageMath.

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arXiv2014

Short Tops and Semistable Degenerations

One may construct a large class of Calabi-Yau varieties by taking anticanonical hypersurfaces in toric varieties obtained from reflexive polytopes. If the intersection of a reflexive polytope with a hyperplane through the origin yields a lower-dimensional reflexive polytope, then the corresponding Calabi-Yau varieties are fibered by lower-dimensional Calabi-Yau varieties. A top generalizes the idea of splitting a reflexive polytope into two pieces. In contrast to the classification of reflexive polytopes, there are infinite families of equivalence classes of tops. Tops may be used to describe either fibrations or degenerations of Calabi-Yau varieties. We give a simple combinatorial condition on tops which produces semistable degenerations of K3 surfaces, and, when appropriate smoothness conditions are met, semistable degenerations of Calabi-Yau threefolds. Our method is constructive: given a fixed reflexive polytope which will lie on the boundary of the top, we describe an algorithm for constructing tops which yields semistable degenerations of the corresponding hypersurfaces. The properties of each degeneration may be computed directly from the combinatorial structure of the top.

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arXiv2011

Toric Symmetry of CP^3

We exhaustively analyze the toric symmetries of CP^3 and its toric blowups. Our motivation is to study toric symmetry as a computational technique in Gromov-Witten theory and Donaldson-Thomas theory. We identify all nontrivial toric symmetries. The induced nontrivial isomorphisms lift and provide new symmetries at the level of Gromov-Witten Theory and Donaldson-Thomas Theory. The polytopes of the toric varieties in question include the permutohedron, the cyclohedron, the associahedron, and in fact all graph associahedra, among others.

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arXiv2011

On a family of K3 surfaces with $\mathcal{S}_4$ symmetry

The largest group which occurs as the rotational symmetries of a three-dimensional reflexive polytope is the symmetric group on four elements. There are three pairs of three-dimensional reflexive polytopes with this symmetry group, up to isomorphism. We identify a natural one-parameter family of K3 surfaces corresponding to each of these pairs, show that the symmetric group on four elements acts symplectically on members of these families, and show that a general K3 surface in each family has Picard rank 19. The properties of two of these families have been analyzed in the literature using other methods. We compute the Picard-Fuchs equation for the third Picard rank 19 family by extending the Griffiths-Dwork technique for computing Picard-Fuchs equations to the case of semi-ample hypersurfaces in toric varieties. The holomorphic solutions to our Picard-Fuchs equation exhibit modularity properties known as "Mirror Moonshine"; we relate these properties to the geometric structure of our family.

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arXiv2010

Symplectic automorphisms and the Picard group of a K3 surface

We consider the symplectic action of a finite group G on a K3 surface. The Picard group of the K3 surface has a primitive sublattice determined by G. We show how to compute the rank and discriminant of this sublattice. We then describe moduli spaces of K3 surfaces with symplectic G-action, extending results of Nikulin in the abelian case. We use our moduli spaces to develop techniques for classifying all possible symplectic actions of a group G.

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