English

Lagrangian combinatorics of matroids

Combinatorics 2021-09-27 v1

Abstract

The Lagrangian geometry of matroids was introduced in [ADH20] through the construction of the conormal fan of a matroid M. We used the conormal fan to give a Lagrangian-geometric interpretation of the h-vector of the broken circuit complex of M: its entries are the degrees of the mixed intersections of certain convex piecewise linear functions γ\gamma and δ\delta on the conormal fan of M. By showing that the conormal fan satisfies the Hodge-Riemann relations, we proved Brylawski's conjecture that this h-vector is a log-concave sequence. This sequel explores the Lagrangian combinatorics of matroids, further developing the combinatorics of biflats and biflags of a matroid, and relating them to the theory of basis activities developed by Tutte, Crapo, and Las Vergnas. Our main result is a combinatorial strengthening of the hh-vector computation: we write the k-th mixed intersection of γ\gamma and δ\delta explicitly as a sum of biflags corresponding to the nbc-bases of internal activity k+1.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2109.11565,
  title  = {Lagrangian combinatorics of matroids},
  author = {Federico Ardila and Graham Denham and June Huh},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.11565},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

31 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-24T06:16:22.314Z