Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Isospectral Reduction reduces a higher dimension matrix to a lower dimension one while preserving the eigenvalues. This goal is achieved by allowing rational functions of lambda to be the entries of the reduced matrix. It has been shown that isospectral reduction also preserves the eigenvectors. Here we will discuss the conditions under which the generalized eigenvectors also get preserved. We will discuss some sufficient conditions and the reconstruction of the original network.

Given a simple connected graph G=(V,E), the abelian sandpile Markov chain evolves by adding chips to random vertices and then stabilizing according to certain toppling rules. The recurrent states form an abelian group \Gamma, the sandpile group of G. I will discuss joint work with Dan Jerison and Lionel Levine in which we characterize the eigenvalues and eigenfunctions of the chain restricted to \Gamma in terms of "multiplicative harmonic functions'' on V. We show that the moduli of the eigenvalues are determined up to a constant factor by the lengths of vectors in an appropriate dual Laplacian lattice and use this observation to bound the mixing time of the sandpile chain in terms of the number of vertices and maximum vertex degree of G. We also derive a surprising inverse relationship between the spectral gap of the sandpile chain and that of simple random walk on G.

Let G be a 5-connected graph and let x1, x2,y1,y2 in V(G) be distinct, such that G[{x1, x2, y1, y2}] is isomorphic to K_4^- and y1y2 is not in E(G). We show that G contains a K_4^- in which x1 is of degree 2, or G-x1 contains K_4^-, or G contains a TK_5 in which x1 is not a branch vertex, or {x2, y1, y2} may be chosen so that for any distinct w1,w2 in N(x1) - {x2, y1, y2}, G - {x1v : v is not in {w1, w2, x2, y1,y2} } contains TK_5.

This talk concerns recent joint work with E. M. Stein on the extension to higher dimension of Calder\'on's andCoifman-McIntosh-Meyer's seminal results about the Cauchy integral for a Lipschitz planar curve (interpreted as the boundary of a Lipschitz domain $D\subset\mathbb C$). From the point of view of complex analysis, a fundamental feature of the 1-dimensional Cauchy kernel:\vskip-1.0em$$H(w, z) = \frac{1}{2\pi i}\frac{dw}{w-z}$$\smallskip\vskip-0.7em\noindent is that it is holomorphic (that is, analytic) as a function of $z\in D$. In great contrast with the one-dimensional theory, in higher dimension there is no obvious holomorphic analogueof $H(w, z)$. This is because of geometric obstructions (the Levi problem) that in dimension 1 are irrelevant. A good candidate kernel for the higher dimensional setting was first identified by Jean Lerayin the context of a $C^\infty$-smooth, convex domain $D$: while these conditions on $D$ can be relaxed a bit, if the domain is less than $C^2$-smooth (much less Lipschitz!) Leray's construction becomes conceptually problematic.In this talk I will present {\em(a)}, the construction of theCauchy-Leray kernel and {\em(b)}, the $L^p(bD)$-boundedness of the induced singular integral operator under the weakest currently known assumptions on the domain's regularity -- in the case of a planar domain these are akin to Lipschitz boundary, but in our higher-dimensional context the assumptions we make are in fact optimal. The proofs rely in a fundamental way on a suitably adapted version of the so-called ``\,$T(1)$-theorem technique'' from real harmonic analysis.Time permitting, I will describe applications of this work to complex function theory -- specifically, to the Szeg\H o and Bergman projections (that is, the orthogonal projections of $L^2$ onto, respectively, the Hardy and Bergman spaces of holomorphic functions).