Sharpening the Norm Bound in the Subspace Perturbation Theory

Let $A$ be a (possibly unbounded) self-adjoint operator on a separable Hilbert space $\mathfrak H .$ Assume that $\sigma $ is an isolated component of the spectrum of $A$ , that is, $\mathrm{dist}(\sigma ,\Sigma )=d>0$ where $\Sigma =\mathrm spec (A)\setminus \sigma .$ Suppose that $V$ is a bounded self-adjoint operator on $\mathfrak H $ such that $\Vert V\Vert <d/2$ and let $L=A+V$ , $\mathrm{Dom }(L)=\mathrm{Dom }(A).$ Denote by $P$ the spectral projection of $A$ associated with the spectral set $\sigma $ and let $Q$ be the spectral projection of $L$ corresponding to the closed $\Vert V\Vert $ -neighborhood of $\sigma .$ Introducing the sequence $$\begin{aligned} \varkappa _n=\frac{1}{2}\left(1-\frac{(\pi ^2-4)^n}{(\pi ^2+4)^n}\right), \quad n\in \{0\}\cup {\mathbb N }, \end{aligned}$$ we prove that the following bound holds: $$\begin{aligned} \arcsin (\Vert P-Q\Vert )\le M_\star \left(\frac{\Vert V\Vert }{d}\right), \end{aligned}$$ where the estimating function $M_\star (x)$ , $x\in \bigl [0,\frac{1}{2}\bigr )$ , is given by $$\begin{aligned} M_\star (x)=\frac{1}{2}\,\,n_{_\#}(x)\,\arcsin \left(\frac{4\pi }{\pi ^2+4}\right) +\frac{1}{2}\,\arcsin \left(\frac{\pi ( x-\varkappa _{n_{_\#}(x)})}{1-2\varkappa _{n_{_\#}(x)})}\right), \end{aligned}$$ with $n_{_\#}(x)=\max \left\{ n\,\bigr |\,\,n\in \{0\}\cup {\mathbb N }\,, \varkappa _n\le x\right\} $ . The bound obtained is essentially stronger than the previously known estimates for $\Vert P-Q\Vert .$ Furthermore, this bound ensures that $\Vert P-Q\Vert <1$ and, thus, that the spectral subspaces $\mathrm{Ran }(P)$ and $\mathrm{Ran }(Q)$ are in the acute-angle case whenever $\Vert V\Vert <c_\star \,d$ , where $$\begin{aligned} c_\star =16\,\,\frac{\pi ^6-2\pi ^4+32\pi ^2-32}{(\pi ^2+4)^4}=0.454169\ldots . \end{aligned}$$ Our proof of the above results is based on using the triangle inequality for the maximal angle between subspaces and on employing the a priori generic $\sin 2\theta $ estimate for the variation of a spectral subspace. As an example, the boundedly perturbed quantum harmonic oscillator is discussed.     

On the largest conjugacy class length of a finite group

Let $G$ be a finite group and $\mathrm{bcl}(G)$ the largest conjugacy class length of $G$ . In this note we slightly improve He and Shi’s lower bound for $\mathrm{bcl}(G)$ , showing that $|\mathrm{bcl}(G)|\ge p^{\frac{1}{p}}(|G:O_{p}(G)|_{p})^{\frac{p-1}{p}}$ .     

Divisibility of class numbers of imaginary quadratic function fields by a fixed odd number

In this paper we find a new lower bound on the number of imaginary quadratic extensions of the function field $\mathbb{F}_{q}(x)$ whose class groups have elements of a fixed odd order. More precisely, for q, a power of an odd prime, and g a fixed odd positive integer ≥?3, we show that for every ε?>?0, there are $\gg q^{L(\frac{1}{2}+\frac{3}{2(g+1)}-\epsilon)}$ polynomials $f \in \mathbb{F}_{q}[x]$ with $\deg f=L$ , for which the class group of the quadratic extension $\mathbb{F}_{q}(x, \sqrt{f})$ has an element of order g. This sharpens the previous lower bound $q^{L(\frac{1}{2}+\frac{1}{g})}$ of Ram Murty. Our result is a function field analogue which is similar to a result of Soundararajan for number fields.     

Weak-strong uniqueness criterion for the \beta -generalized surface quasi-geostrophic equation

We prove that weak-strong uniqueness holds for the $\beta $ -generalized surface quasi-geostrophic equation in the regular class $\nabla \theta \in L^{q}(0,T; L^{p}(\mathbb{R }^{2}))$ with $\frac{\alpha }{q}+\frac{2}{p}=\alpha +\beta -1$ , where $\alpha \in (0,1], \beta \in [1,2)$ and $\frac{2}{\alpha +\beta -1}<p<\infty $ .     

Boundedness of Generalized Riesz Transforms on Orlicz–Hardy Spaces Associated to Operators

Let ${\Phi}$ be a continuous, strictly increasing and concave function on (0, ∞) of critical lower type index ${p_\Phi^- \in(0,\,1]}$ . Let L be an injective operator of type ω having a bounded H _∞ functional calculus and satisfying the k-Davies–Gaffney estimates with ${k \in {\mathbb Z}_+}$ . In this paper, the authors first introduce an Orlicz–Hardy space ${H^{\Phi}_{L}(\mathbb{R}^n)}$ in terms of the non-tangential L-adapted square function and then establish its molecular characterization. As applications, the authors prove that the generalized Riesz transform ${D_{\gamma}L^{-\delta/(2k)}}$ is bounded from the Orlicz–Hardy space ${H^{\Phi}_{L}(\mathbb{R}^n)}$ to the Orlicz space ${L^{\widetilde{\Phi}}(\mathbb{R}^n)}$ when ${p_\Phi^- \in (0, \frac{n}{n+ \delta - \gamma}]}$ , ${0 < \gamma \le \delta < \infty}$ and ${\delta- \gamma < n (\frac{1}{p_-(L)}-\frac{1}{p_+(L)})}$ , or from ${H^{\Phi}_{L}(\mathbb{R}^n)}$ to the Orlicz–Hardy space ${H^{\widetilde \Phi}(\mathbb{R}^n)}$ when ${p_\Phi^-\in (\frac{n}{n + \delta+ \lfloor \gamma \rfloor- \gamma},\,\frac{n}{n+ \delta- \gamma}]}$ , ${1\le \gamma \le \delta < \infty}$ and ${\delta- \gamma < n (\frac{1}{p_-(L)}-\frac{1}{p_+(L)})}$ , or from ${H^{\Phi}_{L}(\mathbb{R}^n)}$ to the weak Orlicz–Hardy space ${WH^\Phi(\mathbb{R}^n)}$ when ${\gamma = \delta}$ and ${p_\Phi=n/(n + \lfloor \gamma \rfloor)}$ or ${p_\Phi^-=n/(n + \lfloor \gamma \rfloor)}$ with ${p_\Phi^-}$ attainable, where ${\widetilde{\Phi}}$ is an Orlicz function whose inverse function ${\widetilde{\Phi}^{-1}}$ is defined by ${\widetilde{\Phi}^{-1}(t):=\Phi^{-1}(t)t^{\frac{1}{n}(\gamma- \delta)}}$ for all ${t \in (0,\,\infty)}$ , ${p_\Phi}$ denotes the strictly critical lower type index of ${\Phi}$ , ${\lfloor \gamma \rfloor}$ the maximal integer not more than ${\gamma}$ and ${(p_-(L),\,p_+(L))}$ the range of exponents ${p \in[1,\, \infty]}$ for which the semigroup ${\{e^{-tL}\}_{t >0 }}$ is bounded on ${L^p(\mathbb{R}^n)}$ .     

A decomposition of the universal embedding space for the near polygon {{\mathbb H}_n}

Let ${{\mathbb H}_n, n \geq 1}$ , be the near 2n-gon defined on the 1-factors of the complete graph on 2n?+?2 vertices, and let e denote the absolutely universal embedding of ${{\mathbb H}_n}$ into PG(W), where W is a ${\frac{1}{n+2} \left(\begin{array}{c}2n+2 \\ n+1\end{array}\right)}$ -dimensional vector space over the field ${{\mathbb F}_2}$ with two elements. For every point z of ${{\mathbb H}_n}$ and every ${i \in {\mathbb N}}$ , let Δ _i (z) denote the set of points of ${{\mathbb H}_n}$ at distance i from z. We show that for every pair {x, y} of mutually opposite points of ${{\mathbb H}_n, W}$ can be written as a direct sum ${W_0 \oplus W_1 \oplus \cdots \oplus W_n}$ such that the following four properties hold for every ${i \in \{0,\ldots,n \}}$ : (1) ${\langle e(\Delta_i(x) \cap \Delta_{n-i}(y)) \rangle = {\rm PG}(W_i)}$ ; (2) ${\left\langle e \left( \bigcup_{j \leq i} \Delta_j(x) \right) \right\rangle = {\rm PG}(W_0 \oplus W_1 \oplus \cdots \oplus W_i)}$ ; (3) ${\left\langle e \left( \bigcup_{j \leq i} \Delta_j(y) \right) \right\rangle = {\rm PG}(W_{n-i}\oplus W_{n-i+1} \oplus \cdots \oplus W_n)}$ ; (4) ${\dim(W_i) = |\Delta_i(x) \cap \Delta_{n-i}(y)| = \left(\begin{array}{c}n \\ i\end{array}\right)^2 - \left(\begin{array}{c}n \\ i-1\end{array}\right) \cdot \left(\begin{array}{c}n \\ i+1\end{array}\right)}$ .     

Isolated boundary singularities of semilinear elliptic equations

Given a smooth domain ${\Omega\subset\mathbb{R}^N}$ such that ${0 \in \partial\Omega}$ and given a nonnegative smooth function ?? on ???, we study the behavior near 0 of positive solutions of ???u?=?u ^q in ?? such that u =? ?? on ???\{0}. We prove that if ${\frac{N+1}{N-1} < q < \frac{N+2}{N-2}}$ , then ${u(x)\leq C |x|^{-\frac{2}{q-1}}}$ and we compute the limit of ${|x|^{\frac{2}{q-1}} u(x)}$ as x ?? 0. We also investigate the case ${q= \frac{N+1}{N-1}}$ . The proofs rely on the existence and uniqueness of solutions of related equations on spherical domains.     

Calabi Product Lagrangian Immersions in Complex Projective Space and Complex Hyperbolic Space

Starting from two Lagrangian immersions and a Legendre curve ${\tilde{\gamma}(t)}$ in ${\mathbb{S}^3(1)}$ $({\rm or\,in}\,{\mathbb{H}_1^3(-1)})$ , it is possible to construct a new Lagrangian immersion in ${\mathbb{CP}^n(4)}$ $({\rm or\,in}\,{\mathbb{CH}^n(-4)})$ , which is called a warped product Lagrangian immersion. When ${\tilde{\gamma}(t)=(r_1e^{i(\frac{r_2}{r_1}at)}, \;r_2e^{i(- \frac{r_1}{r_2}at)})}$ $({\rm or}\,{\tilde{\gamma}(t)=(r_1e^{i(\frac{r_2}{r_1}at)}, \;r_2e^{i( \frac{r_1}{r_2}at)})})$ , where r ₁, r ₂, and a are positive constants with ${r_1^2+r_2^2=1}$ $({\rm or}\,{-r_1^2+r_2^2=-1})$ , we call the new Lagrangian immersion a Calabi product Lagrangian immersion. In this paper, we study the inverse problem: how to determine from the properties of the second fundamental form whether a given Lagrangian immersion of ${\mathbb{CP}^n(4)}$ or ${\mathbb{CH}^n(-4)}$ is a Calabi product Lagrangian immersion. When the Calabi product is minimal, or is Hamiltonian minimal, or has parallel second fundamental form, we give some further characterizations.     

Norm Estimates of the Pre-Schwarzian Derivatives for \alpha -Spiral-Like Functions of Order \rho

For a constant $\alpha \in (-\frac{\pi }{2},\frac{\pi }{2})$ and $0\!\le \!\rho \!<\!1,$ we define the set of all $\alpha $ -spiral-like functions of order $\rho $ consisting of functions $f$ that are univalent on the unit disk and satisfy the condition $ Re\left(e^{-i\alpha }\frac{zf^{\prime }(z)}{f(z)}\right)>\rho \cos \alpha $ for any point $z$ in the unit disk. In the present paper, we shall give the best estimate for the norm of the pre-Schwarzian derivative ${\text{ T}}_f(z)=f^{\prime \prime }(z)/f^{\prime }(z)$ where $||T_f||= \sup (1-|z|^2)|T_f(z)|$ .     

A sharp equivalence between H ∞ functional calculus and square function estimates

Let (T _t ) _{t?≥ 0} be a bounded analytic semigroup on L ^p (Ω), with 1?<?p?<?∞. Let ?A denote its infinitesimal generator. It is known that if A and A ^* both satisfy square function estimates ${\bigl\|\bigl(\int_{0}^{\infty} \vert A^{\frac{1}{2}} T_t(x)\vert^2 {\rm d}t \bigr)^{\frac{1}{2}}\bigr\|_{L^p} \lesssim \|x\|_{L^p}}$ and ${\bigl\|\bigl(\int_{0}^{\infty} \vert A^{*\frac{1}{2}} T_t^*(y) \vert^2 {\rm d}t \bigr)^{\frac{1}{2}}\bigr\|_{L^{p^\prime}} \lesssim \|y\|_{L^{p^\prime}}}$ for ${x\in L^p(\Omega)}$ and ${y\in L^{p^\prime}(\Omega)}$ , then A admits a bounded ${H^{\infty}(\Sigma_\theta)}$ functional calculus for any ${\theta>\frac{\pi}{2}}$ . We show that this actually holds true for some ${\theta<\frac{\pi}{2}}$ .     

Regularity of semi-stable solutions to fourth order nonlinear eigenvalue problems on general domains

We examine the fourth order problem $\Delta ^2 u = \lambda f(u) $ in $ \Omega $ with $ \Delta u = u =0 $ on $ {\partial \Omega }$ , where $ \lambda > 0$ is a parameter, $ \Omega $ is a bounded domain in $\mathbb{R }^N$ and where $f$ is one of the following nonlinearities: $ f(u)=e^u$ , $ f(u)=(1+u)^p $ or $ f(u)= \frac{1}{(1-u)^p}$ where $ p>1$ . We show the extremal solution is smooth, provided $$\begin{aligned} N < 2 + 4 \sqrt{2} + 4 \sqrt{ 2 - \sqrt{2}} \approx 10.718 \text{ when} f(u)=e^u, \end{aligned}$$ and $$\begin{aligned} N < \frac{4p}{p-1} + \frac{4(p+1)}{p-1} \left( \sqrt{ \frac{2p}{p+1}} + \sqrt{ \frac{2p}{p+1} - \sqrt{ \frac{2p}{p+1}}} - \frac{1}{2} \right) \end{aligned}$$ when $ f(u)=(u+1)^p$ . New results are also obtained in the case where $ f(u)=(1-u)^{-p}$ . These are substantial improvements to various results on critical dimensions obtained recently by various authors. To do that, we derive a new stability inequality satisfied by minimal solutions of the above equation, which is more amenable to estimates as it allows a method of proof reminiscent of the second order case.     

On averages of Fourier coefficients of Maass cusp forms

Let φ be a primitive Maass cusp form and t _φ (n) be its nth Fourier coefficient at the cusp infinity. In this short note, we are interested in the estimation of the sums ${\sum_{n \leq x}t_{\varphi}(n)}$ and ${\sum_{n \leq x}t_{\varphi}(n^2)}$ . We are able to improve the previous results by showing that for any ${\varepsilon > 0}$ $$\sum_{n \leq x}t_{\varphi}(n) \ll\, _{\varphi, \varepsilon} x^{\frac{1027}{2827} + \varepsilon} \quad {and}\quad\sum_{n \leq x}t_{\varphi}(n^2) \ll\,_{\varphi, \varepsilon} x^{\frac{489}{861} + \varepsilon}.$$      

Quenched to annealed transition in the parabolic Anderson problem

We study limit behavior for sums of the form $\frac{1}{|\Lambda_{L|}}\sum_{x\in \Lambda_{L}}u(t,x),$ where the field $\Lambda_L=\left\{x\in {\bf{Z^d}}:|x|\le L\right\}$ is composed of solutions of the parabolic Anderson equation $$u(t,x) = 1 + \kappa \mathop{\int}_{0}^{t} \Delta u(s,x){\rm d}s + \mathop{\int}_{0}^{t}u(s,x)\partial B_{x}(s). $$ The index set is a box in Z ^d , namely $\Lambda_{L} = \left\{x\in {\bf Z}^{\bf d} : |x| \leq L\right\}$ and L = L(t) is a nondecreasing function $L : [0,\infty)\rightarrow {\bf R}^{+}. $ We identify two critical parameters $\eta(1) < \eta(2)$ such that for $\gamma > \eta(1)$ and L(t) = e^{γ t} , the sums $\frac{1}{|\Lambda_L|}\sum_{x\in \Lambda_L}u(t,x)$ satisfy a law of large numbers, or put another way, they exhibit annealed behavior. For $\gamma > \eta(2)$ and L(t) = e^{γ t} , one has $\sum_{x\in \Lambda_L}u(t,x)$ when properly normalized and centered satisfies a central limit theorem. For subexponential scales, that is when $\lim_{t \rightarrow \infty} \frac{1}{t}\ln L(t) = 0,$ quenched asymptotics occur. That means $\lim_{t\rightarrow \infty}\frac{1}{t}\ln\left (\frac{1}{|\Lambda_L|}\sum_{x\in \Lambda_L}u(t,x)\right) = \gamma(\kappa),$ where $\gamma(\kappa)$ is the almost sure Lyapunov exponent, i.e. $\lim_{t\rightarrow \infty}\frac{1}{t}\ln u(t,x)= \gamma(\kappa).$ We also examine the behavior of $\frac{1}{|\Lambda_L|}\sum_{x\in \Lambda_L}u(t,x)$ for L = e ^{γ t} with γ in the transition range $(0,\eta(1))$      

Parameter estimation for the discretely observed fractional Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process and the Yuima R package

This paper proposes consistent and asymptotically Gaussian estimators for the parameters $\lambda , \sigma $ and $H$ of the discretely observed fractional Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process solution of the stochastic differential equation $d Y_t = -\lambda Y_t dt + \sigma d W_t^H$ , where $(W_t^H, t\ge 0)$ is the fractional Brownian motion. For the estimation of the drift $\lambda $ , the results are obtained only in the case when $\frac{1}{2} < H < \frac{3}{4}$ . This paper also provides ready-to-use software for the R statistical environment based on the YUIMA package.     

Differentiable vectors and unitary representations of Fréchet–Lie supergroups

A locally convex Lie group G has the Trotter property if, for every $x_1, x_2 \in \mathfrak{g }$ , $$\begin{aligned} \exp _G(t(x_1 + x_2))=\lim _{n \rightarrow \infty } \left(\exp _G\left(\frac{t}{n}x_1\right)\exp _G\left(\frac{t}{n}x_2\right)\right)^n \end{aligned}$$ holds uniformly on compact subsets of $\mathbb{R }$ . All locally exponential Lie groups have this property, but also groups of automorphisms of principal bundles over compact smooth manifolds. A key result of the present article is that, if G has the Trotter property, $\pi : G \rightarrow {\mathrm{GL}}(V)$ is a continuous representation of G on a locally convex space, and $v \in V$ is a vector such that $\overline{\mathtt{d}\pi }(x)v :=\frac{d}{dt}|_{t=0} \pi (\exp _G(tx))v$ exists for every $x \in \mathfrak{g }$ , then the map $\mathfrak{g }\rightarrow V,x \mapsto \overline{\mathtt{d}\pi }(x)v$ is linear. Using this result we conclude that, for a representation of a locally exponential Fréchet–Lie group G on a metrizable locally convex space, the space of $\mathcal{C }^{k}$ -vectors coincides with the common domain of the k-fold products of the operators $\overline{\mathtt{d}\pi }(x)$ . For unitary representations on Hilbert spaces, the assumption of local exponentiality can be weakened to the Trotter property. As an application, we show that for smooth (resp., analytic) unitary representations of Fréchet–Lie supergroups $(G,\mathfrak{g })$ where G has the Trotter property, the common domain of the operators of $\mathfrak{g }=\mathfrak{g }_{\overline{0}}\oplus \mathfrak{g }_{\overline{1}}$ can always be extended to the space of smooth (resp., analytic) vectors for G.     

The second pinching theorem for hypersurfaces with constant mean curvature in a sphere

We generalize the second pinching theorem for minimal hypersurfaces in a sphere due to Peng–Terng, Wei–Xu, Zhang, and Ding–Xin to the case of hypersurfaces with small constant mean curvature. Let $M^n$ be a compact hypersurface with constant mean curvature $H$ in $S^{n+1}$ . Denote by $S$ the squared norm of the second fundamental form of $M$ . We prove that there exist two positive constants $\gamma (n)$ and $\delta (n)$ depending only on $n$ such that if $|H|\le \gamma (n)$ and $\beta (n,H)\le S\le \beta (n,H)+\delta (n)$ , then $S\equiv \beta (n,H)$ and $M$ is one of the following cases: (i) $S^{k}\Big (\sqrt{\frac{k}{n}}\Big )\times S^{n-k}\Big (\sqrt{\frac{n-k}{n}}\Big )$ , $\,1\le k\le n-1$ ; (ii) $S^{1}\Big (\frac{1}{\sqrt{1+\mu ^2}}\Big )\times S^{n-1}\Big (\frac{\mu }{\sqrt{1+\mu ^2}}\Big )$ . Here $\beta (n,H)=n+\frac{n^3}{2(n-1)}H^2+\frac{n(n-2)}{2(n-1)} \sqrt{n^2H^4+4(n-1)H^2}$ and $\mu =\frac{n|H|+\sqrt{n^2H^2+ 4(n-1)}}{2}$ .     

Circular Coloring of Planar Digraphs

Let D be a digraph. The circular chromatic number ${\chi_c(D)}$ and chromatic number ${\chi(D)}$ of D were proposed recently by Bokal et?al. Let ${\vec{\chi_c}(G)={\rm max}\{\chi_c(D)| D\, {\rm is\, an\, orientation\, of} G\}}$ . Let G be a planar graph and n?≥ 2. We prove that if the girth of G is at least ${\frac{10n-5}{3},}$ then ${\vec{\chi_c}(G)\leq \frac{n}{n-1}}$ . We also study the circular chromatic number of some special planar digraphs.     

A unified approach for minimizing composite norms

We propose a first-order augmented Lagrangian algorithm (FALC) to solve the composite norm minimization problem $$\begin{aligned} \begin{array}{ll} \min \limits _{X\in \mathbb{R }^{m\times n}}&\mu _1\Vert \sigma (\mathcal{F }(X)-G)\Vert _\alpha +\mu _2\Vert \mathcal{C }(X)-d\Vert _\beta ,\\ \text{ subject} \text{ to}&\mathcal{A }(X)-b\in \mathcal{Q }, \end{array} \end{aligned}$$ where $\sigma (X)$ denotes the vector of singular values of $X \in \mathbb{R }^{m\times n}$ , the matrix norm $\Vert \sigma (X)\Vert _{\alpha }$ denotes either the Frobenius, the nuclear, or the $\ell _2$ -operator norm of $X$ , the vector norm $\Vert .\Vert _{\beta }$ denotes either the $\ell _1$ -norm, $\ell _2$ -norm or the $\ell _{\infty }$ -norm; $\mathcal{Q }$ is a closed convex set and $\mathcal{A }(.)$ , $\mathcal{C }(.)$ , $\mathcal{F }(.)$ are linear operators from $\mathbb{R }^{m\times n}$ to vector spaces of appropriate dimensions. Basis pursuit, matrix completion, robust principal component pursuit (PCP), and stable PCP problems are all special cases of the composite norm minimization problem. Thus, FALC is able to solve all these problems in a unified manner. We show that any limit point of FALC iterate sequence is an optimal solution of the composite norm minimization problem. We also show that for all $\epsilon >0$ , the FALC iterates are $\epsilon $ -feasible and $\epsilon $ -optimal after $\mathcal{O }(\log (\epsilon ^{-1}))$ iterations, which require $\mathcal{O }(\epsilon ^{-1})$ constrained shrinkage operations and Euclidean projection onto the set $\mathcal{Q }$ . Surprisingly, on the problem sets we tested, FALC required only $\mathcal{O }(\log (\epsilon ^{-1}))$ constrained shrinkage, instead of the $\mathcal{O }(\epsilon ^{-1})$ worst case bound, to compute an $\epsilon $ -feasible and $\epsilon $ -optimal solution. To best of our knowledge, FALC is the first algorithm with a known complexity bound that solves the stable PCP problem.     

Antimatroids and Balanced Pairs

We generalize the $\frac{1}{3}$ – $\frac{2}{3}$ conjecture from partially ordered sets to antimatroids: we conjecture that any antimatroid has a pair of elements x,y such that x has probability between $\frac{1}{3}$ and $\frac{2}{3}$ of appearing earlier than y in a uniformly random basic word of the antimatroid. We prove the conjecture for antimatroids of convex dimension two (the antimatroid-theoretic analogue of partial orders of width two), for antimatroids of height two, for antimatroids with an independent element, and for the perfect elimination antimatroids and node search antimatroids of several classes of graphs. A computer search shows that the conjecture is true for all antimatroids with at most six elements.