Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

A neural code C on n neurons is a collection of subsets of {1,2,...,n} which is used to encode the intersections of subsets U_1, U_2,...,U_n of some topological space. The study of neural codes reveals the ways in which geometric or topological properties can be encoded combinatorially. A prominent example is the property of max-intersection completeness: if a code C contains every possible intersection of its maximal codewords, then one can always find a collection of open convex U_1, U_2,..., U_n for which C is the code. In this talk I will answer a question posed by Curto et al. (2018), which asks if there is a way of determining max-intersection completeness from examination of the neural ideal, an algebraic counterpart to the neural code.