Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

I will discuss recent work of Bhargav Bhatt, myself and Shunsuke Takagi relating several open problems and generalizing work of Mustata and Srinivas. First: whether a smooth complex variety is ordinary after reduction to characteristic $p > 0$ for infinitely many $p$. Second: that multiplier ideals reduce to test ideals for infinitely many $p$ (regardless of coefficients). Finally, whether complex varieties with Du Bois singularities have $F$-injective singularities after reduction to infinitely many $p > 0$.

Polytropes are both ordinary and tropical polytopes. Tropical types of polytropes in \R^n are in bijection with certain cones of a specific Gr\"obner fan in \R^{n^2-n}. Unfortunately, even for n = 5 the entire fan is too large to be computed by existing software. We show that the polytrope cones can be decomposed as the cones from the refinement of two fans, intersecting with a specific cone. This allows us to enumerate types of full-dimensional polytropes for $n = 4$, and maximal polytropes for $n = 5$ and $n = 6$. In this talk, I will prove the above result and describe the key difficulty in higher dimensions.

Markov bases have been developed in algebraic statistics for exact goodness-of-fit testing. They connect all elements in a fiber (given by the sufficient statistics) and allow building a Markov chain to approximate the distribution of a test statistic by its posterior distribution. However, finding a Markov basis is often computationally intractable. In addition, the number of Markov steps required for converging to the stationary distribution depends on the connectivity of the sampling space.In this joint work with Caroline Uhler and Sarah Cepeda, we compare different test statistics and study the combinatorial structure of the finite lattice Ising model. We propose a new method for exact goodness-of-fit testing. Our technique avoids computing a Markov basis but builds a Markov chain consisting only of simple moves (i.e. swaps of two interior sites). These simple moves might not be sufficient to create a connected Markov chain. We prove that when a bounded change in the sufficient statistics is allowed, the resulting Markov chain is connected. The proposed algorithm not only overcomes the computational burden of finding a Markov basis, but it might also lead to a better connectivity of the sampling space and hence a faster convergence.

Recent work by J. and N. Giansiracusa, myself, and O. Lorscheid suggests that the tropical geometry of a toric variety $X$, or more generally of a logarithmic scheme $X$, can be formalized as a "Berkovich analytification" of a scheme over the field $\mathbb{F}_1$ with one element that is canonically associated to $X$.The goal of this talk is to introduce the theory of Artin fans, originally due to D. Abramovich and J. Wise, which can be used to lift rather unwieldy $\mathbb{F}_1$-geometric objects to the more familiar realm of algebraic stacks. Artin fans are \'etale locally isomorphic to quotient stacks of toric varieties by their big tori and their glueing data has a completely combinatorial description in terms of Kato fans.I am going to explain how to use the ideas surrounding the notion of Artin fans to study tropicalization maps associated to toric varieties and logarithmic schemes. Surprisingly these techniques allow us to give a reinterpretation of Tevelev's theory of tropical compactifications that can be generalized to compactifications of subvarieties in logarithmically smooth compactifcations of smooth varieties. For example, we can introduce definitions of tropical pairs and schoen varieties in terms of Artin fans that are equivalent to Tevelev's notions.