Some totally geodesic submanifolds of the nonlinear Grassmannian of a compact symmetric space

Let \(M\) and \(N\) be two connected smooth manifolds, where \(M\) is compact and oriented and \(N\) is Riemannian. Let \(\mathcal {E}\) be the Fréchet manifold of all embeddings of \(M\) in \(N\) , endowed with the canonical weak Riemannian metric. Let \(\sim \) be the equivalence relation on \(\mathcal {E}\) defined by \(f\sim g\) if and only if \(f=g\circ \phi \) for some orientation preserving diffeomorphism \(\phi \) of \(M\) . The Fréchet manifold \(\mathcal {S}= \mathcal {E}/_{\sim }\) of equivalence classes, which may be thought of as the set of submanifolds of \(N\) diffeomorphic to \(M\) and is called the nonlinear Grassmannian (or Chow manifold) of \(N\) of type \(M\) , inherits from \( \mathcal {E}\) a weak Riemannian structure. We consider the following particular case: \(N\) is a compact irreducible symmetric space and \(M\) is a reflective submanifold of \(N\) (that is, a connected component of the set of fixed points of an involutive isometry of \( N\) ). Let \(\mathcal {C}\) be the set of submanifolds of \(N\) which are congruent to \(M\) . We prove that the natural inclusion of \(\mathcal {C}\) in \(\mathcal {S}\) is totally geodesic.     

Neighbour-transitive codes in Johnson graphs

The Johnson graph \(J(v,k)\) has, as vertices, the \(k\) -subsets of a \(v\) -set \(\mathcal {V}\) and as edges the pairs of \(k\) -subsets with intersection of size \(k-1\) . We introduce the notion of a neighbour-transitive code in \(J(v,k)\) . This is a proper vertex subset \(\Gamma \) such that the subgroup \(G\) of graph automorphisms leaving \(\Gamma \) invariant is transitive on both the set \(\Gamma \) of ‘codewords’ and also the set of ‘neighbours’ of \(\Gamma \) , which are the non-codewords joined by an edge to some codeword. We classify all examples where the group \(G\) is a subgroup of the symmetric group \(\mathrm{Sym}\,(\mathcal {V})\) and is intransitive or imprimitive on the underlying \(v\) -set \(\mathcal {V}\) . In the remaining case where \(G\le \mathrm{Sym}\,(\mathcal {V})\) and \(G\) is primitive on \(\mathcal {V}\) , we prove that, provided distinct codewords are at distance at least \(3\) , then \(G\) is \(2\) -transitive on \(\mathcal {V}\) . We examine many of the infinite families of finite \(2\) -transitive permutation groups and construct surprisingly rich families of examples of neighbour-transitive codes. A major unresolved case remains.     

Large collections of curves pairwise intersecting exactly once

Let \(\Omega =(\omega _{j})_{j\in I}\) be a maximum size collection of pairwise non-isotopic simple closed curves on the closed, orientable, genus \(g\) surface \(S_{g}\) , such that \(\omega _{i}\) and \(\omega _{j}\) intersect exactly once for \(i\ne j\) . We show that for \(g\ge 3\) , there exists atleast two such collections up to the action of the mapping class group, answering a question posed by Malestein, Rivin and Theran. As a consequence, we show that the automorphism group of the systole graph for \(S_{g}, g\ge 3\) (whose vertices are isotopy classes of simple closed curves, and whose edges correspond to pairs of curve intersecting once) does not act transitively on maximal complete subgraphs.     

Randomized large distortion dimension reduction

Consider a random matrix \(H:{\mathbb {R}}^{n}\longrightarrow {\mathbb {R}}^{m}\) . Let \(D\ge 2\) and let \(\{W_l\}_{l=1}^{p}\) be a set of \(k\) -dimensional affine subspaces of \({\mathbb {R}}^{n}\) . We ask what is the probability that for all \(1\le l\le p\) and \(x,y\in W_l\) , $$\begin{aligned} \Vert x-y\Vert _2\le \Vert Hx-Hy\Vert _2\le D\Vert x-y\Vert _2. \end{aligned}$$ We show that for \(m=O\big (k+\frac{\ln {p}}{\ln {D}}\big )\) and a variety of different classes of random matrices \(H\) , which include the class of Gaussian matrices, existence is assured and the probability is very high. The estimate on \(m\) is tight in terms of \(k,p,D\) .     

Characterization of ellipses as uniformly dense sets with respect to a family of convex bodies

Let \(K\subset \mathbb R ^N\) be a convex body containing the origin. A measurable set \(G\subset \mathbb R ^N\) with positive Lebesgue measure is said to be uniformly \(K\) -dense if, for any fixed \(r>0\) , the measure of \(G\cap (x+r K)\) is constant when \(x\) varies on the boundary of \(G\) (here, \(x+r K\) denotes a translation of a dilation of \(K\) ). We first prove that \(G\) must always be strictly convex and at least \(C^{1,1}\) -regular; also, if \(K\) is centrally symmetric, \(K\) must be strictly convex, \(C^{1,1}\) -regular and such that \(K=G-G\) up to homotheties; this implies in turn that \(G\) must be \(C^{2,1}\) -regular. Then for \(N=2\) , we prove that \(G\) is uniformly \(K\) -dense if and only if \(K\) and \(G\) are homothetic to the same ellipse. This result was already proven by Amar et al. in 2008 . However, our proof removes their regularity assumptions on \(K\) and \(G\) , and more importantly, it is susceptible to be generalized to higher dimension since, by the use of Minkowski’s inequality and an affine inequality, avoids the delicate computations of the higher-order terms in the Taylor expansion near \(r=0\) for the measure of \(G\cap (x+r\,K)\) (needed in 2008).     

Weak lower semicontinuity for polyconvex integrals in the limit case

We prove a lower semicontinuity result for polyconvex functionals of the Calculus of Variations along sequences of maps \(u:\Omega \subset \mathbb{R }^n\rightarrow \mathbb{R }^m\) in \(W^{1,m}\) , \(2\le m\le n\) , bounded in \(W^{1,m-1}\) and convergent in \(L^1\) under mild technical conditions but without any extra coercivity assumption on the integrand.     

On an extension of the Frobenius^{\prime } theorem about p-nilpotency of a finite group

Suppose that \(G\) is a finite group and \(H\) is a subgroup of \(G\) . \(H\) is said to be \(s\) -quasinormally embedded in \(G\) if for each prime \(p\) dividing the order of \(H\) , a Sylow \(p\) -subgroup of \(H\) is also a Sylow \(p\) -subgroup of some \(s\) -quasinormal subgroup of \(G\) . We fix in every non-cyclic Sylow subgroup \(P\) of \(G\) some subgroup \(D\) satisfying \(1<|D|<|P|\) and study the \(p\) -nilpotency of \(G\) under the assumption that every subgroup \(H\) of \(P\) with \(|H|=|D|\) is \(s\) -quasinormally embedded in \(G\) . Some recent results and the Frobenius \(^{\prime }\) theorem are generalized.     

Uncertainty principles and sum complexes

Let \(p\) be a prime and let \(A\) be a nonempty subset of the cyclic group \(C_p\) . For a field \({\mathbb F}\) and an element \(f\) in the group algebra \({\mathbb F}[C_p]\) let \(T_f\) be the endomorphism of \({\mathbb F}[C_p]\) given by \(T_f(g)=fg\) . The uncertainty number \(u_{{\mathbb F}}(A)\) is the minimal rank of \(T_f\) over all nonzero \(f \in {\mathbb F}[C_p]\) such that \(\mathrm{supp}(f) \subset A\) . The following topological characterization of uncertainty numbers is established. For \(1 \le k \le p\) define the sum complex \(X_{A,k}\) as the \((k-1)\) -dimensional complex on the vertex set \(C_p\) with a full \((k-2)\) -skeleton whose \((k-1)\) -faces are all \(\sigma \subset C_p\) such that \(|\sigma |=k\) and \(\prod _{x \in \sigma }x \in A\) . It is shown that if \({\mathbb F}\) is algebraically closed then $$\begin{aligned} u_{{\mathbb F}}(A)=p-\max \{k :\tilde{H}_{k-1}(X_{A,k};{\mathbb F}) \ne 0\}. \end{aligned}$$ The main ingredient in the proof is the determination of the homology groups of \(X_{A,k}\) with field coefficients. In particular it is shown that if \(|A| \le k\) then \(\tilde{H}_{k-1}(X_{A,k};{\mathbb F}_p)\!=\!0.\)      

The Ubiquity of the Orders of Fractional Semifields of Even Characteristic

To each non-square integer \(2^{2N+1}\ge 2^5\) there correspond semifields \(D\) of order of \(2^{2N+1}\) that contain \(\text{ GF}(4)\) . Hence there exist affine planes for each non-square order \(2^{2N+1}\ge 2^{5}\) that contain subaffine planes of order \(2^2\) . Moreover, there also exists semifields \(D_1\) and \(D_2\) , with \(|D_1|= |D_2| =|D|\) such that \(D_1\) is commutative and \(D_2\) is non-commutative but neither \(D_1\) nor \(D_2\) contains \(\text{ GF}(4)\) .