The Principal Minor Map

Series
Algebra Seminar
Time
Monday, September 11, 2023 - 1:00pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Abeer Al Ahmadieh – Georgia Tech
Organizer
Changxin Ding

The principal minor map takes an n x n square matrix and maps it to the 2^n-length vector of its principal minors. In this talk, I will describe both the fiber and the image of this map. In 1986, Loewy proposed a sufficient condition for the fiber to be a single point up to diagonal equivalence. I will provide a necessary and sufficient condition for the fiber to be a single point. Additionally, I will describe the image of the space of complex matrices using a characterization of determinantal representations of multiaffine polynomials, based on the factorization of their Rayleigh differences. Using these techniques I will give equations and inequalities characterizing the images of the spaces of real and complex symmetric and Hermitian matrices. This is based on joint research with Cynthia Vinzant.