Tag Archives: Matroids

A Fields Medal for June Huh

Congratulations to all of the winners of the 2022 Fields Medal! The only one I know personally, and whose work I have studied in detail, is June Huh.

I’m happy both for June himself and for the field of combinatorics more broadly, which at one point was not taken seriously enough by the mathematics community to merit Fields Medal level consideration. I’m particularly interested in connections between combinatorics and algebraic geometry, and that is certainly something that June’s work has taken to new heights.

I thought it might be useful for me to post links to my previous blog posts about June’s work here, along with some related links.

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Lorentzian Polynomials II: Applications

In this previous post, I described the basic theory of Lorentzian polynomials d’après Brändén and Huh. Now I’d like to describe some of the powerful applications of this theory, culling together results from papers by several different sets of authors. Our first application will be Mason’s Ultra-Log-Concavity Conjecture from 1972, established independently by Brändén-Huh and Anari-Liu-Oveis Gharan-Vinzant in 2018.

Theorem: Let M be a matroid on n elements, and let I_k(M) denote the number of independent sets of size k in M. Then the sequence I_k(M) is ultra-log-concave.

A special case of this result (which seems to be no easier to prove than the general case) is the following: Let E be a set of n vectors in some finite-dimensional vector space, and let I_k denote the number of k-element linearly independent subsets of E. Then the sequence I_k is ULC.

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Lorentzian polynomials I: Theory

I’m organizing a reading seminar this semester on Lorentzian polynomials, mainly following this paper by Brändén and Huh but also covering some of the work of Anari et. al. In this post, I’d like to give a quick introduction to this active and beautiful subject. I’ll concentrate on the basic theory for now, and in a follow-up post I’ll discuss some of the striking applications of this theory.

One major goal of the theory of Lorentzian polynomials is to provide new techniques for proving that various naturally-occurring sequences of non-negative real numbers a_k are log-concave, meaning that a_k^2 \geq a_{k-1} a_{k+1} for all k. More generally, the authors consider homogeneous multivariate polynomials p(x_1,\ldots,x_n) with non-negative coefficients and study certain natural extensions of log-concavity to this setting. (For some background on log-concave sequences, see this survey paper which I wrote for the Bulletin of the AMS.) So let me begin by introducing two “classical” methods for proving (an even sharper version of) log-concavity of the coefficients of certain polynomials.

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The Circuit-Cocircuit Reversal System and Torsor Structures on Spanning Trees

The Jacobian of a finite graph G is a finite abelian group whose cardinality is equal to the number of spanning trees of G.  In this earlier post, I discussed a family of combinatorial bijections between elements of {\rm Jac}(G) and the set {\mathcal T}(G) of spanning trees of G.  I also discussed the fact that for plane graphs, these Bernardi bijections come from a natural simply transitive action of {\rm Jac}(G) on {\mathcal T}(G) (or, more precisely, a natural isomorphism class of such actions).

In the present post, I’d like to discuss a different family of simply transitive actions of {\rm Jac}(G) on {\mathcal T}(G) discovered by myself, Spencer Backman (a former student of mine), and Chi Ho Yuen (a current student of mine).  One virtue of our construction is that it generalizes in a natural way from graphs to regular matroids.  (We will mostly stick to the graphical case in this post, but will insert some comments about extensions to regular and/or oriented matroids.  A regular matroid can be thought of, rather imprecisely, as the smallest natural class of objects which contain graphs and admit a duality theory generalizing duality for planar graphs. Regular matroids are special cases of the more general concept of oriented matroids.)

One of the main new ideas in [BBY] (as we will henceforth refer to our paper) is to use the torsor {\rm Pic}^{g-1}(G) as an intermediate object rather than {\rm Pic}^{g}(G).  The latter is canonically isomorphic (as a {\rm Jac}(G)-torsor) to the set of break divisors on G; the former is isomorphic to the circuit-cocircuit reversal system, which we now introduce.

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Whitney Encounters of the Second Kind

I’m speaking tomorrow in the AMS Current Events Bulletin about the work of Adiprasito, Huh, and Katz on the Rota-Welsh conjecture and Hodge theory for matroids.   See this previous post for an introduction to their work.  [Note added 9/21/17: My write-up for the Current Events Bulletin can be found here.]

Here’s an excerpt from the last section of my slides which I may or may not have time to discuss in tomorrow’s talk.  It concerns this recent paper of June Huh and Botong Wang.  (Note added: As anticipated I did not have time to cover this material!  Here are the slides themselves: ceb_talk)

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Matroids over Hyperfields, Part II

In Part I of this post, we defined hyperrings and hyperfields, gave some key examples, and introduced matroids over (doubly distributive) hyperfields in terms of Grassman-Plücker functions.  If E=\{ 1,\ldots,m \} is a finite set and K is a field, we saw that a K-matroid on E is the same thing as a linear subspace of K^m, and if {\mathbb K} is the Krasner hyperfield then a {\mathbb K}-matroid on E is the same thing as a matroid in the usual sense.  Matroids over the hyperfield {\mathbb S} of signs are the same thing as oriented matroids, and matroids over the tropical hyperfield {\mathbb T} are the same thing as valuated matroids.  In this post we will give some “cryptomorphic” axiomatizations of matroids over hyperfields, discuss duality theory, and then discuss the category of hyperrings in a bit more detail. Continue reading →

Matroids over Hyperfields, Part I

In this post and its sequel, I’d like to explain a new perspective on matroid theory which was introduced in this recent preprint which I wrote with Nathan Bowler.  The main observation is that by working with algebraic structures called hyperfields, in which addition is allowed to be multi-valued, linear subspaces, matroids, valuated matroids, and oriented matroids become special cases of a single general concept.  In the process of explaining this observation, I also hope to advertise how natural hyperfields are, for example in the context of tropical geometry.

Hyperstructures

The notion of an algebraic structure in which addition is allowed to be multi-valued goes back to Frédéric Marty, who introduced hypergroups in 1934.  Later on, in the mid-1950’s, Marc Krasner developed the theory of hyperrings and hyperfields in the context of approximating non-Archimedean fields, and in the 1990’s Murray Marshall explored connections to the theory of real spectra and spaces of orderings.  For the most part, however, the theory of hyperstructures was largely ignored by the mathematical community at large until Connes and Consani started advocating its potential utility in connection with F_1-geometry and the Riemann hypothesis.  There now seems to be a reappraisal of sorts going on within the math community of the “bias” against multi-valued operations.  Continue reading →

Hodge Theory in Combinatorics

AHK_picture

From L to R: Karim Adiprasito, June Huh, Eric Katz

In January 2016, my colleague Josephine Yu and I are organizing a workshop called Hodge Theory in Combinatorics. The goal of the workshop is to present the recent proof of a 50-year-old conjecture of Rota by Karim Adiprasito, June Huh, and Eric Katz. In this post, I want to explain what the conjecture says and give a brief outline of its marvelous proof. I will follow rather closely this paper by Adiprasito-Huh-Katz (henceforth referred to as [AHK]) as well as these slides from a talk by June Huh. Continue reading →

A Celebration of Independence

Yesterday marked the second anniversary of my blog, and today is the 239th birthday of the U.S. In celebration of Independence Day, I want to explain what matroids are. Matroids were invented by Hassler Whitney (and independently by Takeo Nakasawa) to abstract the notion of linear independence from vector spaces to a much more general setting that includes acyclicity in graphs. Other pioneering early work on matroids was done by Garrett Birkhoff and Saunders MacLane. Matroid theory is a rich subject about which we will only scratch the surface here. In particular, there are many different (“cryptomorphic“) ways to present the matroid axioms which all turn out to be (non-obviously) equivalent to one another. We will focus on just a couple of ways of looking at matroids, emphasizing their connections to tropical geometry. Continue reading →