Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

This talk's recording is available here.

The harmonic polytope and the bipermutahedron are two related polytopes which arose in our work with Graham Denham and June Huh on the Lagrangian geometry of matroids. This talk will explain their geometric origin and discuss their algebraic and geometric combinatorics.

The bipermutahedron is a (2n−2)-dimensional polytope with (2n!)/2^n vertices and 3^n−3 facets. Its f-polynomial, which counts the faces of each dimension, is given by a simple evaluation of the three variable Rogers-Ramanujan function. Its h-polynomial, which gives the dimensions of the intersection cohomology of the associated topic variety, is real-rooted, so its coefficients are log-concave.

The harmonic polytope is a (2n−2)-dimensional polytope with (n!)^2(1+1/2+...+1/n) vertices and 3^n−3 facets. Its volume is a weighted sum of the degrees of the projective varieties of all the toric ideals of connected bipartite graphs with n edges; or equivalently, a weighted sum of the lattice point counts of all the corresponding trimmed generalized permutahedra.

These two polytopes are related by a surprising fact: in any dimension, the Minkowski quotient of the bipermutahedron and the harmonic polytope equals 2.

The talk will be as self-contained as possible, and will feature joint work with Graham Denham, Laura Escobar, and June Huh.

A graph G is F-saturated if G is F-free and G+e is not F-free for any edge not in G. The saturation number of F, is the minimum number of edges in an n-vertex F-saturated graph. We consider analogues of this problem in other settings.  In particular we prove saturation versions of some Ramsey-type theorems on graphs and Dilworth-type theorems on posets. We also consider semisaturation problems, wherein we only require that any extension of the combinatorial structure creates new copies of the forbidden configuration.  In this setting, we prove a semisaturation version of the Erdös-Szekeres theorem on convex k-gons, as well as multiple semisaturation theorems for sequences and posets. Joint work with Gábor Damásdi, Balázs Keszegh, David Malec, Casey Tompkins, and Oscar Zamora.

Mathematics can help all of us sort through some complicated scenarios, with changing inputs, and changing conclusions.  I will illustrate this with some examples.  Porker hands and Jury selection bias:  Expert testimony that I gave in a death penalty case.  Specificity of testing:  A random person tests positive for COVID.  Do they have the disease?  Designing pooled testing for the disease.  When is it effective?

We shall discuss a recent paper of Wanless and Wood (arXiv:2008.00775), which proves a Lovász Local Lemma type result using inductive counting arguments.
For example, in the context of hypergraph colorings, under LLL-type assumptions their result typically gives exponentially many colorings (usually more than the textbook proof of LLL would give).
We will present a probabilistic proof of the Wanless-Wood result, and discuss some applications to k-SAT, Ramsey number lower bounds, and traversals, as time permits.