Related papers: Log-concavity and lower bounds for arithmetic circ…

We make progress on some questions related to polynomial approximations of ${\rm AC}^0$. It is known, by works of Tarui (Theoret. Comput. Sci. 1993) and Beigel, Reingold, and Spielman (Proc. $6$th CCC, 1991), that any ${\rm AC}^0$ circuit…

In a recent paper, the first author proved the log-concavity of the coefficients of the characteristic polynomial of a matroid realizable over a field of characteristic 0, answering a long-standing conjecture of Read in graph theory. We…

Let $f(x,y)$ be a real polynomial of degree $d$ with isolated critical points, and let $i$ be the index of $grad f$ around a large circle containing the critical points. An elementary argument shows that $|i| \leq d-1$. In this paper we…

We study log-concavity properties of real sequences $(a_n)_{n \ge 0}$ satisfying a $d$-th order linear recurrence whose coefficients are linear functions of $n$; the so-called P-recursive (or holonomic) sequences. Writing the recurrence in…

Let $N$ be a large prime and $P, Q \in \mathbb{Z}[x]$ two linearly independent polynomials with $P(0) = Q(0) = 0$. We show that if a subset $A$ of $\mathbb{Z}/N\mathbb{Z}$ lacks a progression of the form $(x, x + P(y), x + Q(y), x + P(y) +…

We introduce a new problem on the elementary symmetric polynomials $\sigma_k$, stemming from the constraint equations of some modified gravity theory. For which coefficients is a linear combination of $\sigma_k$ $1/p$-concave, with $0 \leq…

We prove the reverse ultra log-concavity of the Boros-Moll polynomials. We further establish an inequality which implies the log-concavity of the sequence $\{i!d_i(m)\}$ for any $m\geq 2$, where $d_i(m)$ are the coefficients of the…

In this paper, two structural results concerning low degree polynomials over finite fields are given. The first states that over any finite field $\mathbb{F}$, for any polynomial $f$ on $n$ variables with degree $d \le \log(n)/10$, there…

We investigate threshold phenomena for random polytopes $K_N=\conv\{X_1,\dots,X_N\}$ generated by i.i.d.\ samples from an atomic law $\mu$. We identify and provide a missing justification in the discrete-hypercube threshold argument of…

We study limitations of polynomials computed by depth two circuits built over read-once polynomials (ROPs) and depth three syntactically multi-linear formulas. We prove an exponential lower bound for the size of the $\Sigma\Pi^{[N^{1/30}]}$…

Euler's gamma function is logarithmically convex on positive semi-axis. Additivity of logarithmic convexity implies that the function sum of gammas with non-negative coefficients is also log-convex. In this paper we investigate the series…

We consider the problem of testing whether an unknown low-degree polynomial $p$ over $\mathbb{R}^n$ is sparse versus far from sparse, given access to noisy evaluations of the polynomial $p$ at \emph{randomly chosen points}. This is a…

We study the power of negation in the Boolean and algebraic settings and show the following results. * We construct a family of polynomials $P_n$ in $n$ variables, all of whose monomials have positive coefficients, such that $P_n$ can be…

We prove super-polynomial lower bounds on the size of propositional proof systems operating with constant-depth algebraic circuits over fields of zero characteristic. Specifically, we show that the subset-sum variant…

We show fully polynomial time randomized approximation schemes (FPRAS) for counting matchings of a given size, or more generally sampling/counting monomer-dimer systems in planar, not-necessarily-bipartite, graphs. While perfect matchings…

For every positive integer $n$, consider the linear operator $\U_{n}$ on polynomials of degree at most $d$ with integer coefficients defined as follows: if we write $\frac{h(t)}{(1 - t)^{d + 1}} = \sum_{m \geq 0} g(m) t^{m}$, for some…

Menon's proof of the preservation of log-concavity of sequences under convolution becomes simpler when adapted to 2-sided infinite sequences. Under assumption of log-concavity of two 2-sided infinite sequences, the existence of the…

Volume polynomials form a distinguished class of log-concave polynomials with remarkable analytic and combinatorial properties. I will survey realization problems related to them, review fundamental inequalities they satisfy, and discuss…

We study the problem of minimizing a multivariate polynomial function over the unit hypercube. By representing the polynomial through a hypergraph and exploiting its sparsity structure, we establish a new sufficient condition under which…

We prove a lower bound of $\Omega\left(n^{1.5}\right)$ for the number of product gates in non-commutative arithmetic circuits for an explicit $n$-variate degree-$n$ polynomial $f_{n}$ (over every field). We observe that this implies that…