Seminars in February 2012

  • Tony Huynh, Intertwining connectivities for matroids

    Intertwining connectivities for matroids
    Tony Huynh
    Department of Mathematical Sciences, KAIST
    2012/2/29 Wed 4PM-5PM
    An intertwine of two graphs G and H is a graph that has both G and H as a minor and is minor-minimal with this property. In 1979, Lovász and Unger conjectured that for any two graphs G and H, there are only a finite number of intertwines. This now follows from the graph minors project of Robertson and Seymour, although no ‘elementary’ proof is known.
    In this talk, we consider intertwining problems for matroids. Bonin proved that there are matroids M and N that have infinitely many intertwines. However, it is conjectured that if M and N are both representable over a fixed finite field, then there are only finitely many intertwines. We prove a weak version of this conjecture where we intertwine ‘connectivities’ instead of minors. No knowledge of matroid theory will be assumed.
    This is joint work with Bert Gerards (CWI, Amsterdam) and Stefan van Zwam (Princeton University).
    Tags:
  • FYI: Enumerative Combinatorics mini Workshop 2012 (ECmW2012)

    2012/02/21-22 Tue-Wed (Room: 1409, Building E6-1)

    Organizer: Seunghyun Seo (서승현) and Heesung Shin (신희성)

    List of speakers</p>
    • Tuesday 10:30AM-12PM Seunghyun Seo (서승현), Kangwon National University, Refined enumeration of trees by the size of maximal decreasing trees
    • Tuesday 1:30PM-3PM HwanChul Yoo (유환철), KIAS, Specht modules of general diagrams and their Hecke counterparts
    • Tuesday 4PM-5:30PM Heesung Shin (신희성), Inha University, q-Hermite 다항식을 포함하는 두 항등식에 관하여
    • Wednesday 10:30AM-12PM Soojin Cho (조수진), Ajou University, Skew Schur P-functions
    • Wednesday 1:30PM-3PM Sangwook Kim (김상욱), Chonnam National University, Flag vectors of polytopes
  • Alfredo Hubard, Convex equipartitions of convex sets

    Convex equipartitions of convex sets
    Alfredo Hubard
    Department of Mathematics, New York University, New York, USA
    2012/2/15 Wed 4PM-5PM
    Imagine that you are cooking chicken at a party. You will cut the raw chicken fillet with a sharp knife, marinate each of the pieces in a spicy sauce and then fry the pieces. The surface of each piece will be crispy and spicy. Can you cut the chicken so that all your guests get the same amount of crispy crust and the same amount of chicken?
    We show that if the number of guests is a prime power, n=pk. Then such partition is possible. We derive this from a more general statement about equipartitions of convex bodies with respect to a measure and d-1 continuous functionals on the space of convex bodies, where d is the dimension the convex body sits in.
    Our proof uses optimal transport and equivariant topology.
  • Andrew King, Proving the Lovász-Plummer Conjecture

    Proving the Lovász-Plummer Conjecture
    Andrew King
    Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Victoria, Canada
    2012/02/08 Wed 4PM-5PM
    In the 1970s, Lovász and Plummer conjectured that every cubic bridgeless graph has exponentially many perfect matchings. This was proven by Voorhoeve for bipartite graphs and by Chudnovsky and Seymour for planar graphs. In this talk I will describe our proof of the general case, which uses elements of both aforementioned partial results as well as Edmonds’ characterization of the perfect matching polytope.
    (Joint work with Louis Esperet, František Kardoš, Daniel Král’, and Sergey Norin.)
    Tags:
  • KAIST Discrete Geometry Day 2012

    KAIST Discrete Geometry Day 2012
    2012/2/1 Wed (Room: 3433, Building E6-1)

    Poster (KAIST Discrete Geometry Day 2012)

    List of speakers

    • 10AM-11:50AM Michael Dobbins: Universality for families of non-crossing convex sets
    • 11:00AM-11:50AM Arseniy Akopyan: Kadets type theorems for partitions of a convex body
    • 3PM-3:50PM Roman Karasev: An analogue of Gromov’s waist theorem for coloring the cube
    • 4PM-4:50PM Edward D. Kim: Lattice paths and Lagrangian matroids
    • 5PM-5:50PM Alfredo Hubard: Space crossing numbers

    Universality for families of non-crossing convex sets
    Michael Dobbins (KAIST)
    Mnev’s Universality theorem gives a construction showing that for any primary semialgebraic set, there is a family of points in the plane of fixed combinatorial type given by an oriented matroid such that the realization space of the family is homotopic to the semialgebraic set. Analogous universality results have also been shown for polytopes. Recently, we have found that the realization spaces of families of non-crossing convex sets in the plane with fixed combinatorial type are contractible, but that universality holds for families of non-crossing convex polygons with a bounded number of vertices.

    Kadets type theorems for partitions of a convex body
    Arseniy Akopyan (Institute for Information Transmission Problems)
    For convex partitions of a convex body B we try to put a homothetic copy of B into each set of the partition so that the sum of homothety coefficients is greater or equal 1. In the plane this can be done for arbitrary partition, while in higher dimensions we need certain restrictions on the partition.

    An analogue of Gromov’s waist theorem for coloring the cube
    Roman Karasev (Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology)
    It is proved that if we partition a d-dimensional cube into nd small cubes and color the small cubes into m+1 colors then there
    exists a monochromatic connected component consisting of at least f(d, m)=nd-m small cubes. The constant f(d,m) in our present approach looks quite ugly. In particular cases m=d-1 the question (and the answer) goes back to Lebesgue, the case m=1 was examined by Matousek and Privuetivy. They also conjectured the general case with other m. The same question was posed in informal discussions in Moscow by Alexey-Kanel-Belov. The proof will be based on (widely understood) Gromov’s method of contraction in the space of cycles. A different independent proof of a stronger fact was found by Marsel-Matdinov. Certain unsolved problems remain in this area. For example, Gromov’s question about extending the sphere waist theorem for maps into polyhedra which are not manifolds with bound depending only on the dimension.

    Lattice paths and Lagrangian matroids
    Edward D. Kim (POSTECH)
    We investigate lattice path Lagrangian matroids, a family of Lagrangian matroids introduced by Joe Bonin and Anna de Mier. One definition for Lagrangian matroids involves a construction of ordinary matroids. We discuss the corresponding relationship holds between lattice path Lagrangian matroids and lattice path matroids, proving one direction of a conjecture by de Mier relating lattice path Lagrangian matroids and lattice path matroids.

    Space Crossing Numbers
    We define a higher dimensional geometric analogue of the the crossing number of graph theory. The basic idea comes from the theory of line transversals and the Tverberg-Vrecica conjecture. Namely, we think of a crossing as a transversal 0-flat to a pair of edges or faces, and define space crossing as a transversal k-flat to a number of edges or faces. We obtain an almost tight space crossing number inequality that implies the classical crossing number inequality (up to a logaritmic factor). Joint work with Boris Bukh.

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