Related papers: Around Sylvester's question in the plane

Among the simple Lie algebras, $D_4$ is distinguished as the unique one whose group of outer-automorphisms is bigger than $\mathbb{Z}_2$. We study the compactifications of the $D_4$ (2,0) Theory on a punctured Riemann surface, $C$, with…

Consider a random walk in $\mathbb{R}^d$ that starts at the origin and whose increment distribution assigns zero probability to any affine hyperplane. We solve Sylvester's problem for these random walks by showing that the probability that…

Let $P$ be a convex polyhedron in $\mathbb{R}^3$. The skeleton of $P$ is the graph whose vertices and edges are the vertices and edges of $P$, respectively. We prove that, if these vertices are on the unit-sphere, the skeleton is a $(0.999…

Given a rank 3 real arrangement $\mathcal A$ of $n$ lines in the projective plane, the Dirac-Motzkin conjecture (proved by Green and Tao in 2013) states that for $n$ sufficiently large, the number of simple intersection points of $\mathcal…

The Atiyah-Sutcliffe normalized determinant function $D$ is a smooth complex-valued function on $C_n(H^3)$, where $C_n(H^3)$ denotes the configuration space of $n$ distinct points in hyperbolic $3$-space $H^3$. The hyperbolic version of the…

In 2010 Santos described the construction of a counterexample to the Hirsch conjecture, and in 2012 Santos and Weibel provided the coordinates for the 40 facets of a 20-dimensional counterexample. In this paper we explore technical details…

How much can randomness help computation? Motivated by this general question and by volume computation, one of the few instances where randomness provably helps, we analyze a notion of dispersion and connect it to asymptotic convex…

Let $(W, S)$ be a Coxeter system equipped with a fixed automorphism $\ast$ of order $\leq 2$ which preserves $S$. Lusztig (and with Vogan in some special cases) have shown that the space spanned by set of "twisted" involutions was naturally…

The Gaussian polytope $\mathcal P_{n,d}$ is the convex hull of $n$ independent standard normally distributed points in $\mathbb R^d$. We derive explicit expressions for the probability that $\mathcal P_{n,d}$ contains a fixed point…

In 1977, Victor Guillemin published a paper discussing geometric scattering theory, in which he related the Lax-Phillips Scattering matrices (associated to a noncompact hyperbolic surface with cusps) and the sojourn times associated to a…

The Separating Hyperplane theorem is a fundamental result in Convex Geometry with myriad applications. Our first result, Random Separating Hyperplane Theorem (RSH), is a strengthening of this for polytopes. $\rsh$ asserts that if the…

For a given $\lambda >0$, a convex body in $\mathbb R^n$ is $\lambda$-convex if it is the intersection of (finitely or infinitely many) balls of radius $1/\lambda$. In this note, we show that among all $\lambda$-convex bodies in $\mathbb…

Let $n\geq 3$, and let $B_1^n$ be the standard $n$-dimensional cross-polytope (i.e. the convex hull of standard coordinate vectors and their negatives). We show that there exists a symmetric convex body $\mathcal G_m$ in ${\mathbb R}^n$…

Hilbert famously showed that polynomials in n variables are not too complicated, in various senses. For example, the Hilbert Syzygy Theorem shows that the process of resolving a module by free modules terminates in finitely many (in fact,…

An important question with a rich history is the extent to which the symplectic category is larger than the Kaehler category. Many interesting examples of non-Kaehler symplectic manifolds have been constructed. However, sufficiently large…

Let OT_d(n) be the smallest integer N such that every N-element point sequence in R^d in general position contains an order-type homogeneous subset of size n, where a set is order-type homogeneous if all (d+1)-tuples from this set have the…

We show that $m$ points and $n$ two-dimensional algebraic surfaces in $\mathbb{R}^4$ can have at most $O(m^{\frac{k}{2k-1}}n^{\frac{2k-2}{2k-1}}+m+n)$ incidences, provided that the algebraic surfaces behave like pseudoflats with $k$ degrees…

Strassen's asymptotic rank conjecture [Progr. Math. 120 (1994)] claims a strong submultiplicative upper bound on the rank of a three-tensor obtained as an iterated Kronecker product of a constant-size base tensor. The conjecture, if true,…

The complex Busemann-Petty problem asks whether origin symmetric convex bodies in C^n with smaller central hyperplane sections necessarily have smaller volume. The answer is affirmative if n\leq 3 and negative if n\geq 4. In this article we…

Let $Q_n$ denote a random symmetric $n$ by $n$ matrix, whose upper diagonal entries are i.i.d. Bernoulli random variables (which take values 0 and 1 with probability 1/2). We prove that $Q_n$ is non-singular with probability…