Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

One can associate regular cell complexes to various objects from discrete and combinatorial geometry such as real and complex hyperplane arrangements, oriented matroids and CAT(0) cube complexes. The faces of these cell complexes have a natural algebraic structure. In a seminal paper from 1998, Bidigare, Hanlon and Rockmore exploited this algebraic structure to model a number of interesting Markov chains including the riffle shuffle and the top-to-random shuffle, as well as the Tsetlin library. Using the representation theory of the associated algebras, they gave a complete description of the spectrum of the transition matrix of the Markov chain. Diaconis and Brown proved further results on mixing times and diagonalizability for these Markov chains. Bidigare also noticed in his thesis a natural connection between Solomon's descent algebra for a finite Coxeter group and the algebra associated to its Coxeter arrangement. Given, the nice interplay between the geometry, the combinatorics and the algebra that appeared in these two contexts, it is natural to study the representation theory of these algebras from the point of view of the representation theory of finite dimensional algebras. Building on earlier work of Brown's student, Saliola, for the case of real central hyperplane arrangements, we provide a quiver presentation for the algebras associated to hyperplane arrangements, oriented matroids and CAT(0) cube complexes and prove that these algebras are Koszul duals of incidence algebras of associated posets. Key to obtaining these results is a description of the minimal projective resolutions of the simple modules in terms of the cellular chain complexes of the corresponding cell complexes.This is joint work with Stuart Margolis (Bar-Ilan) and Franco Saliola (University of Quebec at Montreal)