On the Apéry sets of monomial curves

In this paper, we use the Apéry table of the numerical semigroup associated to an affine monomial curve in order to characterize arithmetic properties and invariants of its tangent cone. In particular, we precise the shape of the Apéry table of a numerical semigroup of embedding dimension 3, when the tangent cone of its monomial curve is Buchsbaum or 2-Buchsbaum, and give new proofs for two conjectures raised by Sapko (Commun. Algebra 29:4759–4773, 2001) and Shen (Commun. Algebra 39:1922–1940, 2001). We also provide a new simple proof in the case of monomial curves for Sally’s conjecture (Numbers of Generators of Ideals in Local Rings, 1978) that the Hilbert function of a one-dimensional Cohen-Macaulay ring with embedding dimension three is non-decreasing. Finally, we obtain that monomial curves of embedding dimension 4 whose tangent cones are Buchsbaum, and also monomial curves of any embedding dimensions whose numerical semigroups are balanced, have non-decreasing Hilbert functions. Numerous examples are provided to illustrate the results, most of them computed by using the NumericalSgps package of GAP (Delgado et al., NumericalSgps-a GAP package, 2006).     

A tableau formula for eta polynomials

We use the Pieri and Giambelli formulas of Buch et al. (Invent Math 178:345–405, 2009; J Reine Angew, 2013) and the calculus of raising operators developed in Buch et al. (A Giambelli formula for isotropic Grassmannians, arXiv:0811.2781, 2008) and Tamvakis (J Reine Angew Math 652, 207–244, 2011) to prove a tableau formula for the eta polynomials of Buch et al. (J Reine Angew, 2013) and the Stanley symmetric functions which correspond to Grassmannian elements of the Weyl group $\widetilde{W}_n$ of type $\text {D}_n$ . We define the skew elements of $\widetilde{W}_n$ and exhibit a bijection between the set of reduced words for any skew $w\in \widetilde{W}_n$ and a set of certain standard typed tableaux on a skew shape $\lambda /\mu $ associated to $w$ .     

The convergence of a modified smoothing-type algorithm for the symmetric cone complementarity problem

The symmetric cone complementarity problem (denoted by SCCP) is a broad class of optimization problems, which contains the semidefinite complementarity problem, the second-order cone complementarity problem, and the nonlinear complementarity problem. In this paper we first extend the smoothing function proposed by Huang et al. (Sci. China 44:1107–1114, 2001) for the nonlinear complementarity problem to the context of symmetric cones and show that it is coercive under suitable assumptions. Based on this smoothing function, a smoothing-type algorithm, which is a modified version of the Qi-Sun-Zhou method (Qi et al. in Math. Program. 87:1–35, 2000), is proposed for solving the SCCP. By using the theory of Euclidean Jordan algebras, we prove that the proposed algorithm is globally and locally quadratically convergent under suitable assumptions. Preliminary numerical results for some second-order cone complementarity problems are reported which indicate that the proposed algorithm is effective.     

Lower and upper Ginchev derivatives of vector functions and their applications to multiobjective optimization

Based on the definitions of lower and upper limits of vector functions introduced in Rahmo and Studniarski (J Math Anal Appl 393:212–221, 2012), we extend the lower and upper Ginchev directional derivatives to functions with values in finite-dimensional spaces where partial order is introduced by a polyhedral cone. This allows us to obtain some modifications of the optimality conditions from Luu (Higher-order optimality conditions in nonsmooth cone-constrained multiobjective programming. Institute of Mathematics, Hanoi, Vietnam 2008) with weakened assumptions on the minimized function.     

Geometric RSK correspondence,Whittaker functions and symmetrized random polymers

We show that the geometric lifting of the RSK correspondence introduced by A.N. Kirillov (Physics and Combinatorics. Proc. Nagoya 2000 2nd Internat Workshop, pp. 82–150, 2001) is volume preserving with respect to a natural product measure on its domain, and that the integrand in Givental’s integral formula for \(\mathit{GL}(n,{\mathbb{R}})\) -Whittaker functions arises naturally in this context. Apart from providing further evidence that Whittaker functions are the natural analogue of Schur polynomials in this setting, our results also provide a new ‘combinatorial’ framework for the study of random polymers. When the input matrix consists of random inverse gamma distributed weights, the probability distribution of a polymer partition function constructed from these weights can be written down explicitly in terms of Whittaker functions. Next we restrict the geometric RSK mapping to symmetric matrices and show that the volume preserving property continues to hold. We determine the probability law of the polymer partition function with inverse gamma weights that are constrained to be symmetric about the main diagonal, with an additional factor on the main diagonal. The third combinatorial mapping studied is a variant of the geometric RSK mapping for triangular arrays, which is again showed to be volume preserving. This leads to a formula for the probability distribution of a polymer model whose paths are constrained to stay below the diagonal. We also show that the analogues of the Cauchy-Littlewood identity in the setting of this paper are equivalent to a collection of Whittaker integral identities conjectured by Bump (Number Theory, Trace Formulas, and Discrete Groups, pp. 49–109, 1989) and Bump and Friedberg (Festschrift in Honor of Piatetski-Shapiro, Part II, pp. 47–65, 1990) and proved by Stade (Am. J. Math. 123:121–161, 2001; Israel J. Math. 127:201–219, 2002). Our approach leads to new ‘combinatorial’ proofs and generalizations of these identities, with some restrictions on the parameters.     

Directional Lipschitzness of Minimal Time Functions in Hausdorff Topological Vector Spaces

In a general Hausdorff topological vector space E, we associate to a given nonempty closed set S???E and a bounded closed set Ω???E, the minimal time function T _S,Ω defined by $T_{S,\Omega}(x):= \inf \{ t> 0: S\cap (x+t\Omega)\not = \emptyset\}$ . The study of this function has been the subject of various recent works (see Bounkhel (2012, submitted, 2013, accepted); Colombo and Wolenski (J Global Optim 28:269–282, 2004, J Convex Anal 11:335–361, 2004); He and Ng (J Math Anal Appl 321:896–910, 2006); Jiang and He (J Math Anal Appl 358:410–418, 2009); Mordukhovich and Nam (J Global Optim 46(4):615–633, 2010) and the references therein). The main objective of this work is in this vein. We characterize, for a given Ω, the class of all closed sets S in E for which T _S,Ω is directionally Lipschitz in the sense of Rockafellar (Proc Lond Math Soc 39:331–355, 1979). Those sets S are called Ω-epi-Lipschitz. This class of sets covers three important classes of sets: epi-Lipschitz sets introduced in Rockafellar (Proc Lond Math Soc 39:331–355, 1979), compactly epi-Lipschitz sets introduced in Borwein and Strojwas (Part I: Theory, Canad J Math No. 2:431–452, 1986), and K-directional Lipschitz sets introduced recently in Correa et al. (SIAM J Optim 20(4):1766–1785, 2010). Various characterizations of this class have been established. In particular, we characterize the Ω-epi-Lipschitz sets by the nonemptiness of a new tangent cone, called Ω-hypertangent cone. As for epi-Lipschitz sets in Rockafellar (Canad J Math 39:257–280, 1980) we characterize the new class of Ω-epi-Lipschitz sets with the help of other cones. The spacial case of closed convex sets is also studied. Our main results extend various existing results proved in Borwein et al. (J Convex Anal 7:375–393, 2000), Correa et al. (SIAM J Optim 20(4):1766–1785, 2010) from Banach spaces and normed spaces to Hausdorff topological vector spaces.     

Error estimates for series solutions to a class of nonlinear integral equations of mixed type

In this paper, we prove that the accelerated Adomian polynomials formula suggested by Adomian (Nonlinear Stochastic Systems: Theory and Applications to Physics, Kluwer, Dordrecht, 1989) and the accelerated formula suggested by El-Kalla (Int. J. Differ. Equs. Appl. 10(2):225?C234, 2005; Appl. Math. E-Notes 7:214?C221, 2007) are identically the same. The Kalla-iterates exhibit the same faster convergence exhibited by Adomian??s accelerated iterates with the additional advantage of absence of any derivative terms in the recursion, thereby allowing for ease of computation. Moreover, the formula of El-Kalla is used directly to prove the convergence of the series solution to a class of nonlinear two dimensional integral equations. Convergence analysis is reliable enough to estimate the maximum absolute truncated error of the Adomian series solution.     

A parallel interior point decomposition algorithm for block angular semidefinite programs

We present a two phase interior point decomposition framework for solving semidefinite (SDP) relaxations of sparse maxcut, stable set, and box constrained quadratic programs. In phase 1, we suitably modify the matrix completion scheme of Fukuda et al. (SIAM J. Optim. 11:647–674, 2000) to preprocess an existing SDP into an equivalent SDP in the block-angular form. In phase 2, we solve the resulting block-angular SDP using a regularized interior point decomposition algorithm, in an iterative fashion between a master problem (a quadratic program); and decomposed and distributed subproblems (smaller SDPs) in a parallel and distributed high performance computing environment. We compare our MPI (Message Passing Interface) implementation of the decomposition algorithm on the distributed Henry2 cluster with the OpenMP version of CSDP (Borchers and Young in Comput. Optim. Appl. 37:355–369, 2007) on the IBM Power5 shared memory system at NC State University. Our computational results indicate that the decomposition algorithm (a) solves large SDPs to 2–3 digits of accuracy where CSDP runs out of memory; (b) returns competitive solution times with the OpenMP version of CSDP, and (c) attains a good parallel scalability. Comparing our results with Fujisawa et al. (Optim. Methods Softw. 21:17–39, 2006), we also show that a suitable modification of the matrix completion scheme can be used in the solution of larger SDPs than was previously possible.     

Vector partition functions and generalized dahmen and micchelli spaces

This is the first of a series of papers on partition functions and the index theory of transversally elliptic operators. In this paper we only discuss algebraic and combinatorial issues related to partition functions. The applications to index theory are in [4], while in [5] and [6] we shall investigate the cohomological formulas generated by this theory. Here we introduce a space of functions on a lattice which generalizes the space of quasipolynomials satisfying the difference equations associated to cocircuits of a sequence of vectors X, introduced by Dahmen and Micchelli [8]. This space $ \mathcal{F}(X) $ contains the partition function $ {\mathcal{P}_{(X)}} $ . We prove a “localization formula” for any f in $ \mathcal{F}(X) $ , inspired by Paradan's decomposition formula [12]. In particular, this implies a simple proof that the partition function $ {\mathcal{P}_{(X)}} $ is a quasi-polynomial on the Minkowski differences $ \mathfrak{c} - B(X) $ , where c is a big cell and B(X) is the zonotope generated by the vectors in X, a result due essentially to Dahmen and Micchelli.     

Fundamentals of Bicomplex Pseudoanalytic Function Theory: Cauchy Integral Formulas, Negative Formal Powers and Schrödinger Equations with Complex Coefficients

The study of the Dirac system and second-order elliptic equations with complex-valued coefficients on the plane naturally leads to bicomplex Vekua-type equations (Campos et al. in Adv Appl Clifford Algebras, 2012; Castañeda et al. in J Phys A Math Gen 38:9207–9219, 2005; Kravchenko in J Phys A Math Gen 39:12407–12425, 2006). To the difference of complex pseudoanalytic (or generalized analytic) functions (Bers in Theory of pseudo-analytic functions. New York University, New York, 1952; Vekua in Generalized analytic functions. Nauka, Moscow (in Russian); English translation Oxford, 1962. Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1959) the theory of bicomplex pseudoanalytic functions has not been developed. Such basic facts as, e.g., the similarity principle or the Liouville theorem in general are no longer available due to the presence of zero divisors in the algebra of bicomplex numbers. In the present work we develop a theory of bicomplex pseudoanalytic formal powers analogous to the developed by Bers (Theory of pseudo-analytic functions. New York University, 1952) and especially that of negative formal powers. Combining the approaches of Bers and Vekua with some additional ideas we obtain the Cauchy integral formula in the bicomplex setting. In the classical complex situation this formula was obtained under the assumption that the involved Cauchy kernel is global, a very restrictive condition taking into account possible practical applications, especially when the equation itself is not defined on the whole plane. We show that the Cauchy integral formula remains valid with the Cauchy kernel from a wider class called here the reproducing Cauchy kernels. We give a complete characterization of this class. To our best knowledge these results are new even for complex Vekua equations. We establish that reproducing Cauchy kernels can be used to obtain a full set of negative formal powers for the corresponding bicomplex Vekua equation and present an algorithm which allows one their construction. Bicomplex Vekua equations of a special form called main Vekua equations are closely related to stationary Schrödinger equations with complex-valued potentials. We use this relation to establish useful connections between the reproducing Cauchy kernels and the fundamental solutions for the Schrödinger operators which allow one to construct the Cauchy kernel when the fundamental solution is known and vice versa. Moreover, using these results we construct the fundamental solutions for the Darboux transformed Schrödinger operators.     

On Valid Inequalities for Mixed Integer p-Order Cone Programming

We discuss two families of valid inequalities for linear mixed integer programming problems with cone constraints of arbitrary order, which arise in the context of stochastic optimization with downside risk measures. In particular, we extend the results of Atamtürk and Narayanan (Math. Program., 122:1–20, 2010, Math. Program., 126:351–363, 2011), who developed mixed integer rounding cuts and lifted cuts for mixed integer programming problems with second-order cone constraints. Numerical experiments conducted on randomly generated problems and portfolio optimization problems with historical data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.     

Polynomial growth harmonic functions on finitely generated abelian groups

In the present paper, we develop geometric analysis techniques on Cayley graphs of finitely generated abelian groups to study the polynomial growth harmonic functions. We provide a geometric analysis proof of the classical Heilbronn theorem (Heilbronn in Proc Camb Philos Soc 45:194–206, 1949) and the recent Nayar theorem (Nayar in Bull Pol Acad Sci Math 57:231–242, 2009) on polynomial growth harmonic functions on lattices $\mathbb Z ^n$ that does not use a representation formula for harmonic functions. In the abelian group case, by Yau’s gradient estimate, we actually give a simplified proof of a general polynomial growth harmonic function theorem of (Alexopoulos in Ann Probab 30:723–801, 2002). We calculate the precise dimension of the space of polynomial growth harmonic functions on finitely generated abelian groups by linear algebra, rather than by Floquet theory Kuchment and Pinchover (Trans Am Math Soc 359:5777–5815, 2007). While the Cayley graph not only depends on the abelian group, but also on the choice of a generating set, we find that this dimension depends only on the group itself. Moreover, we also calculate the dimension of solutions to higher order Laplace operators.     

Approximation of rank function and its application to the nearest low-rank correlation matrix

The rank function rank(.) is neither continuous nor convex which brings much difficulty to the solution of rank minimization problems. In this paper, we provide a unified framework to construct the approximation functions of rank(.), and study their favorable properties. Particularly, with two families of approximation functions, we propose a convex relaxation method for the rank minimization problems with positive semidefinite cone constraints, and illustrate its application by computing the nearest low-rank correlation matrix. Numerical results indicate that this convex relaxation method is comparable with the sequential semismooth Newton method (Li and Qi in SIAM J Optim 21:1641–1666, 2011) and the majorized penalty approach (Gao and Sun, 2010) in terms of the quality of solutions.     

Foulkes characters, Eulerian idempotents, and an amazing matrix

John Holte (Am. Math. Mon. 104:138?C149, 1997) introduced a family of ??amazing matrices?? which give the transition probabilities of ??carries?? when adding a list of numbers. It was subsequently shown that these same matrices arise in the combinatorics of the Veronese embedding of commutative algebra (Brenti and Welker, Adv. Appl. Math. 42:545?C556, 2009; Diaconis and Fulman, Am. Math. Mon. 116:788?C803, 2009; Adv. Appl. Math. 43:176?C196, 2009) and in the analysis of riffle shuffling (Diaconis and Fulman, Am. Math. Mon. 116:788?C803, 2009; Adv. Appl. Math. 43:176?C196, 2009). We find that the left eigenvectors of these matrices form the Foulkes character table of the symmetric group and the right eigenvectors are the Eulerian idempotents introduced by Loday (Cyclic Homology, 1992) in work on Hochschild homology. The connections give new closed formulae for Foulkes characters and allow explicit computation of natural correlation functions in the original carries problem.     

Symmetric rearrangements around infinity with applications to Lévy processes

We prove a new rearrangement inequality for multiple integrals, which partly generalizes a result of Friedberg and Luttinger (Arch Ration Mech 61:35–44, 1976) and can be interpreted as involving symmetric rearrangements of domains around $\infty $ . As applications, we prove two comparison results for general Lévy processes and their symmetric rearrangements. The first application concerns the survival probability of a point particle in a Poisson field of moving traps following independent Lévy motions. We show that the survival probability can only increase if the point particle does not move, and the traps and the Lévy motions are symmetrically rearranged. This essentially generalizes an isoperimetric inequality of Peres and Sousi (Geom Funct Anal 22(4):1000–1014, 2012) for the Wiener sausage. In the second application, we show that the $q$ -capacity of a Borel measurable set for a Lévy process can only decrease if the set and the Lévy process are symmetrically rearranged. This result generalizes an inequality obtained by Watanabe (Z Wahrsch Verw Gebiete 63:487–499, 1983) for symmetric Lévy processes.     

Bounds of Singular Integrals on Weighted Hardy Spaces and Discrete Littlewood–Paley Analysis

We apply the discrete version of Calderón??s reproducing formula and Littlewood?CPaley theory with weights to establish the $H^{p}_{w} \to H^{p}_{w}$ (0<p<??) and $H^{p}_{w}\to L^{p}_{w}$ (0<p??1) boundedness for singular integral operators and derive some explicit bounds for the operator norms of singular integrals acting on these weighted Hardy spaces when we only assume w??A _??. The bounds will be expressed in terms of the A _q constant of w if q>q _w =inf?{s:w??A _s }. Our results can be regarded as a natural extension of the results about the growth of the A _p constant of singular integral operators on classical weighted Lebesgue spaces $L^{p}_{w}$ in Hytonen et al. (arXiv:1006.2530, 2010; arXiv:0911.0713, 2009), Lerner (Ill.?J.?Math. 52:653?C666, 2008; Proc. Am. Math. Soc. 136(8):2829?C2833, 2008), Lerner et?al. (Int.?Math. Res. Notes 2008:rnm 126, 2008; Math. Res. Lett. 16:149?C156, 2009), Lacey et?al. (arXiv:0905.3839v2, 2009; arXiv:0906.1941, 2009), Petermichl (Am. J. Math. 129(5):1355?C1375, 2007; Proc. Am. Math. Soc. 136(4):1237?C1249, 2008), and Petermichl and Volberg (Duke Math. J. 112(2):281?C305, 2002). Our main result is stated in Theorem?1.1. Our method avoids the atomic decomposition which was usually used in proving boundedness of singular integral operators on Hardy spaces.     

Counting generalized Jenkins–Strebel differentials

We study the combinatorial geometry of “lattice” Jenkins–Strebel differentials with simple zeroes and simple poles on $\mathbb{C }\!\mathrm{P }^1$ and of the corresponding counting functions. Developing the results of Kontsevich (Commun Math Phys 147:1–23, 1992) we evaluate the leading term of the symmetric polynomial counting the number of such “lattice” Jenkins–Strebel differentials having all zeroes on a single singular layer. This allows us to express the number of general “lattice” Jenkins–Strebel differentials as an appropriate weighted sum over decorated trees. The problem of counting Jenkins–Strebel differentials is equivalent to the problem of counting pillowcase covers, which serve as integer points in appropriate local coordinates on strata of moduli spaces of meromorphic quadratic differentials. This allows us to relate our counting problem to calculations of volumes of these strata . A very explicit expression for the volume of any stratum of meromorphic quadratic differentials recently obtained by the authors (Athreya et al. 2012) leads to an interesting combinatorial identity for our sums over trees.     

Lévy–Khinchin formula for the infinite symmetric group

Let ${\mathfrak{S}(\infty)}$ be the infinite symmetric group, inductive limit of the increasing sequence of the symmetric groups ${\mathfrak{S}(n)}$ . We establish an integral representation for the central functions of negative type on ${\mathfrak{S}(\infty)}$ , i.e. a Lévy–Khinchin formula, by following a method introduced by Berg, Christensen and Ressel (Harmonic Analysis on Semigroups. Theory of Positive Definite and Related Functions. Springer, Berlin, 1984).