Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

We will describe a twisted action of the symmetric group on the polynomial ring in n variables and use it to define a twisted version of Schubert polynomials. These twisted Schubert polynomials are known to be related to the Chern-Schwartz-MacPherson classes of Schubert cells in the flag variety. Using properties of skew divided difference operators, we will show that these twisted Schubert polynomials are monomial positive and give a combinatorial formula for their coefficients.

Breathers are periodic in time spatially localized solutions of evolutionary PDEs. They are known to exist for the sine-Gordon equation but are believed to be rare in other Klein-Gordon equations. Exchanging the roles of time and position, breathers can be interpreted as homoclinic solutions to a steady solution. In this talk, I will explain how to obtain an asymptotic formula for the distance between the stable and unstable manifold of the steady solution when the steady solution has weakly hyperbolic one dimensional stable and unstable manifolds. Their distance is exponentially small with respect to the amplitude of the breather and therefore classical perturbative techniques cannot be applied. This is a joint work with O. Gomide, T. Seara and C. Zeng.

High-dimensional inference problems such as sparse PCA and planted clique often exhibit statistical-vs-computational tradeoffs whereby there is no known polynomial-time algorithm matching the performance of the optimal estimator. I will discuss an emerging framework -- based on the so-called low-degree likelihood ratio -- for precisely predicting these tradeoffs and giving rigorous evidence for computational hardness in the conjectured hard regime. This method was originally proposed in a sequence of works on the sum-of-squares hierarchy, and the key idea is to study whether or not there exists a low-degree polynomial that succeeds at a given statistical task.

In the second part of the talk, I will give an application to the algorithmic problem of finding an approximate ground state of the SK (Sherrington-Kirkpatrick) spin glass model. I will explain two variants of this problem: "optimization" and "certification." While optimization can be solved in polynomial time [Montanari'18], we give rigorous evidence (in the low-degree framework) that certification cannot be. This result reveals a fundamental discrepancy between two classes of algorithms: local search succeeds while convex relaxations fail.

Based on joint work with Afonso Bandeira and Tim Kunisky (https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.07324 and https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.11636).

Matroids are combinatorial gadgets that reflect properties of linear algebra in situations where this latter theory is not available. This analogy prescribes that the moduli space of matroids should be a Grassmannian over a suitable base object, which cannot be a field or a ring; in consequence usual algebraic geometry does not provide a suitable framework. In joint work with Matt Baker, we use algebraic geometry over F1, the so-called field with one element, to construct such moduli spaces. As an application, we streamline various results of matroid theory and find simplified proofs of classical theorems, such as the fact that a matroid is regular if and only if it is binary and orientable.

We will dedicate the first half of this talk to an introduction of matroids and their generalizations. Then we will outline how to use F1-geometry to construct the moduli space of matroids. In a last part, we will explain why this theory is so useful to simplify classical results in matroid theory.