Comparison of volumes of convex bodies in real, complex, and quaternionic spaces

The classical Busemann-Petty problem (1956) asks, whether origin-symmetric convex bodies in Rn with smaller hyperplane central sections necessarily have smaller volumes. It is known, that the answer is affirmative if n?4 and negative if n>4. The same question can be asked when volumes of hyperplane sections are replaced by other comparison functions having geometric meaning. We give unified analysis of this circle of problems in real, complex, and quaternionic n-dimensional spaces. All cases are treated simultaneously. In particular, we show that the Busemann-Petty problem in the quaternionic n-dimensional space has an affirmative answer if and only if n=2. The method relies on the properties of cosine transforms on the unit sphere. We discuss possible generalizations.     

The Busemann-Petty problem in hyperbolic and spherical spaces

The Busemann-Petty problem asks whether origin-symmetric convex bodies in Rⁿ with smaller central hyperplane sections necessarily have smaller n-dimensional volume. It is known that the answer to this problem is affirmative if n?4 and negative if n?5. We study this problem in hyperbolic and spherical spaces.     

The Busemann-Petty problem via spherical harmonics

The Busemann-Petty problem asks whether symmetric convex bodies in with smaller central hyperplane sections necessarily have smaller n-dimensional volume. The solution has recently been completed, and the answer is affirmative if n?4 and negative if n?5. In this article we present a short proof of the affirmative result and its generalization using the Funk-Hecke formula for spherical harmonics.     

The combinatorial structure of random polytopes

Choose n random points in , let P_n be their convex hull, and denote by f_i(P_n) the number of i-dimensional faces of P_n. A general method for computing the expectation of f_i(P_n), i=0,…,d−1, is presented. This generalizes classical results of Efron (in the case i=0) and Rényi and Sulanke (in the case i=d−1) to arbitrary i. For random points chosen in a smooth convex body a limit law for f_i(P_n) is proved as n→∞. For random points chosen in a polytope the expectation of f_i(P_n) is determined as n→∞. This implies an extremal property for random points chosen in a simplex.     

Random volumes under a general matrix-variate model

The convex hull generated by p linearly independent points in Euclidean n-space, n?p will almost surely determine a p-simplex and the corresponding p-parallelotope. The volume of this p-parallelotope is where the rows of the p×n,n?p matrix of rank p represent the p linearly independent points. If the points are random points in some sense then v becomes a random volume. The distribution of this random volume v when the matrix X has a very general real rectangular matrix-variate density is the topic of this paper. The complicated classical procedures based on integral geometry techniques for dealing with such problems are replaced by a simpler procedure based on Jacobians of matrix transformations and functions of matrix argument. Apart from the distribution of v under this general model, arbitrary moments of v, connection to the likelihood ratio statistic or λ-criterion for testing hypotheses on the parameters of multivariate normal distributions, connections to Mellin-Barnes integrals and Meijer’s G-function, connection to the concept of generalized variance, various structural decompositions of v and special cases are also examined here.     

Similarity classification of holomorphic curves

Let H be a complex separable Hilbert space. For Ω an open connected subset of C, we shall say that a map is a holomorphic curve, if there exist n holomorphic H-valued functions γ₁,γ₂,…,γn on Ω such that f(λ)=?{γ₁(λ),…,γn(λ)}, ∀λ∈Ω, where Gr(n,H) denotes the Grassmann manifold, the set of all n-dimensional subspaces of H.In the paper, we give a similarity classification of some holomorphic curves by using the K-group of its commutant algebra as an invariant.     

Circular law, extreme singular values and potential theory

Consider the empirical spectral distribution of complex random n×n matrix whose entries are independent and identically distributed random variables with mean zero and variance 1/n. In this paper, via applying potential theory in the complex plane and analyzing extreme singular values, we prove that this distribution converges, with probability one, to the uniform distribution over the unit disk in the complex plane, i.e. the well known circular law, under the finite fourth moment assumption on matrix elements.     

An algorithm for computing Jordan chains and inverting analytic matrix functions

We present an efficient algorithm for obtaining a canonical system of Jordan chains for an n × n regular analytic matrix function A(λ) that is singular at the origin. For any analytic vector function b(λ), we show that each term in the Laurent expansion of A(λ)⁻¹b(λ) may be obtained from the previous terms by solving an (n + d) × (n+d) linear system, where d is the order of the zero of det A(λ) at λ = 0. The matrix representing this linear system contains A(0) as a principal submatrix, which can be useful if A(0) is sparse. The last several iterations can be eliminated if left Jordan chains are computed in addition to right Jordan chains. The performance of the algorithm in floating point and exact (rational) arithmetic is reported for several test cases. The method is shown to be forward stable in floating point arithmetic.     

Intersection bodies and generalized cosine transforms

The paper is focused on intimate connection between geometric properties of intersection bodies in convex geometry and generalized cosine transforms in harmonic analysis. A new concept of λ-intersection body, that unifies some known classes of geometric objects, is introduced. A parallel between trace theorems in function theory, restriction onto lower-dimensional subspaces of the spherical Radon transforms and the generalized cosine transforms, and sections of λ-intersection bodies is established. New integral formulas for different classes of cosine transforms are obtained and examples of λ-intersection bodies are given. We also revisit some known facts in this area and give them new simple proofs.     

A centerless representation of the Virasoro algebra associated with the unitary circular ensemble

We consider the 2-dimensional Toda lattice tau functions τ_n(t,s;η,θ) deforming the probabilities τ_n(η,θ) that a randomly chosen matrix from the unitary group U(n), for the Haar measure, has no eigenvalues within an arc (η,θ) of the unit circle. We show that these tau functions satisfy a centerless Virasoro algebra of constraints, with a boundary part in the sense of Adler, Shiota and van Moerbeke. As an application, we obtain a new derivation of a differential equation due to Tracy and Widom, satisfied by these probabilities, linking it to the Painlevé VI equation.     

New classes of spectrally arbitrary ray patterns

An n×n ray pattern matrix S is said to be spectrally arbitrary if for every monic nth degree polynomial f(λ) with coefficients from C, there is a complex matrix in the ray pattern class of S such that its characteristic polynomial is f(λ). In this article we give new classes of spectrally arbitrary ray pattern matrices.     

Matching binary convexities

We showed in an earlier paper that the Radon number of an n-dimensional binary convexity equals the Radon number of the n-cube, except for a well-determined sequence of dimensions, in which case the Radon number may be one unit larger. Examples of the latter are obtained in every predicted dimension. The basic tool is a matching procedure which works for binary convexities.     

Lifted generalized permutahedra and composition polynomials

Generalized permutahedra are the polytopes obtained from the permutahedron by changing the edge lengths while preserving the edge directions, possibly identifying vertices along the way. We introduce a “lifting” construction for these polytopes, which turns an n  -dimensional generalized permutahedron into an (n+1)$(n+1)$-dimensional one. We prove that this construction gives rise to Stasheff ?s multiplihedron from homotopy theory, and to the more general “nestomultiplihedra”, answering two questions of Devadoss and Forcey.     

Projection problems for symmetric polytopes

Let K⊂Rn be a convex body (a compact, convex subset with non-empty interior), ΠK its projection body. Finding the least upper bound, as K ranges over the class of origin-symmetric convex bodies, of the affine-invariant ratio V(ΠK)/V(K)ⁿ⁻¹, being called Schneider's projection problem, is a well-known open problem in the convex geometry. To study this problem, Lutwak, Yang and Zhang recently introduced a new affine invariant functional for convex polytopes in Rn. For origin-symmetric convex polytopes, they posed a conjecture for the new functional U(P). In this paper, we give an affirmative answer to the conjecture in Rn, thereby, obtain a modified version of Schneider's projection problem.     

The Dirichlet Markov Ensemble

We equip the polytope of n×n Markov matrices with the normalized trace of the Lebesgue measure of Rⁿ². This probability space provides random Markov matrices, with i.i.d. rows following the Dirichlet distribution of mean (1/n,…,1/n). We show that if is such a random matrix, then the empirical distribution built from the singular values of tends as n→∞ to a Wigner quarter-circle distribution. Some computer simulations reveal striking asymptotic spectral properties of such random matrices, still waiting for a rigorous mathematical analysis. In particular, we believe that with probability one, the empirical distribution of the complex spectrum of tends as n→∞ to the uniform distribution on the unit disc of the complex plane, and that moreover, the spectral gap of is of order when n is large.     

A reduction of Keller's conjecture

A family of translates of a closedn-dimensional cube is called a cube tiling if the union of the cubes is the wholen-space and their interiors are disjoint. According to a famous unsolved conjecture of O. H. Keller, two of the cubes in ann-dimensional cube tiling must share a complete (n – 1)-dimensional face. In this paper we shall prove that to solve Keller's conjecture it is sufficient to examine certain factorizations of direct sum of finitely many cyclic group of order four.     

Volumes of symmetric random polytopes

We consider the moments of the volume of the symmetric convex hull of independent random points in an n-dimensional symmetric convex body. We calculate explicitly the second and fourth moments for n points when the given body is (and all of the moments for the case q = 2), and derive from these the asymptotic behavior, as , of the expected volume of a random simplex in those bodies. Received: 5 February 2003     

Typical curvature behaviour of bodies of constant width

It is known that an n-dimensional convex body, which is typical in the sense of Baire category, shows a simple, but highly non-intuitive curvature behaviour: at almost all of its boundary points, in the sense of measure, all curvatures are zero, but there is also a dense and uncountable set of boundary points at which all curvatures are infinite. The purpose of this paper is to find a counterpart to this phenomenon for typical convex bodies of given constant width. Such bodies cannot have zero curvatures. A main result says that for a typical n-dimensional convex body of constant width 1 (without loss of generality), at almost all boundary points, in the sense of measure, all curvatures are equal to 1. (In contrast, note that a ball of width 1 has radius 1/2, hence all its curvatures are equal to 2.) Since the property of constant width is linear with respect to Minkowski addition, the proof requires recourse to a linear curvature notion, which is provided by the tangential radii of curvature.     

Singular value decomposition of large random matrices (for two-way classification of microarrays)

Asymptotic behavior of the singular value decomposition (SVD) of blown up matrices and normalized blown up contingency tables exposed to random noise is investigated. It is proved that such an m×n random matrix almost surely has a constant number of large singular values (of order ), while the rest of the singular values are of order as m,n→∞. We prove almost sure properties for the corresponding isotropic subspaces and for noisy correspondence matrices. An algorithm, applicable to two-way classification of microarrays, is also given that finds the underlying block structure.     

The higher derived functors of the primitive element functor of quasitoric manifolds

Let P be an n-dimensional, q?1 neighborly simple convex polytope and let M2n(λ) be the corresponding quasitoric manifold. The manifold depends on a particular map of lattices λ:Zm→Zn where m is the number of facets of P. In this note we use ESP-sequences in the sense of Larry Smith to show that the higher derived functors of the primitive element functor are independent of λ. Coupling this with results that appear in Bousfield (1970) [3] we are able to enrich the library of nice homology coalgebras by showing that certain families of quasitoric manifolds are nice, at least rationally, from Bousfield?s perspective.