Optimal mass transport and symmetric representations of their cost functions

We consider Monge–Kantorovich problems corresponding to general cost functions \(c(x,y)\) but with symmetry constraints on a Polish space \(X\times X\) . Such couplings naturally generate anti-symmetric Hamiltonians on \(X\times X\) that are \(c\) -convex with respect to one of the variables. In particular, if \(c\) is differentiable with respect to the first variable on an open subset \(X\) in \( \mathbb {R}^d\) , we show that for every probability measure \(\mu \) on \(X\) , there exists a symmetric probability measure \(\pi _0\) on \(X\times X\) with marginals \(\mu \) , and an anti-symmetric Hamiltonian \(H\) such that \(\nabla _2H(y, x)=\nabla _1c(x,y)\) for \( \pi _0\) -almost all \((x,y) \in X \times X.\) If \(\pi _0\) is supported on a graph \((x, Sx)\) , then \(S\) is necessarily a \(\mu \) -measure preserving involution (i.e., \(S^2=I\) ) and \(\nabla _2H(x, Sx)=\nabla _1c(Sx,x)\) for \(\mu \) -almost all \(x \in X.\) For monotone cost functions such as those given by \(c(x,y)=\langle x, u(y)\rangle \) or \(c(x,y)=-|x-u(y)|^2\) where \(u\) is a monotone operator, \(S\) is necessarily the identity yielding a classical result by Krause, namely that \(u(x)=\nabla _2H(x, x)\) where \(H\) is anti-symmetric and concave-convex.     

Oka properties of ball complements

Let $n>1$ be an integer. We prove that holomorphic maps from Stein manifolds $X$ of dimension ${<}n$ to the complement $\mathbb {C}^n{\setminus } L$ of a compact convex set $L\subset \mathbb {C}^n$ satisfy the basic Oka property with approximation and interpolation. If $L$ is polynomially convex then the same holds when $2\dim X \le n$ . We also construct proper holomorphic maps, immersions and embeddings $X\rightarrow \mathbb {C}^n$ with additional control of the range, thereby extending classical results of Remmert, Bishop and Narasimhan.     

Large free sets in powers of universal algebras

We prove that for each universal algebra ${(A, \mathcal{A})}$ of cardinality ${|A| \geq 2}$ and infinite set X of cardinality ${|X| \geq | \mathcal{A}|}$ , the X-th power ${(A^{X}, \mathcal{A}^{X})}$ of the algebra ${(A, \mathcal{A})}$ contains a free subset ${\mathcal{F} \subset A^{X}}$ of cardinality ${|\mathcal{F}| = 2^{|X|}}$ . This generalizes the classical Fichtenholtz–Kantorovitch–Hausdorff result on the existence of an independent family ${\mathcal{I} \subset \mathcal{P}(X)}$ of cardinality ${|\mathcal{I}| = |\mathcal{P}(X)|}$ in the Boolean algebra ${\mathcal{P}(X)}$ of subsets of an infinite set X.     

On conditional permutability and factorized groups

Two subgroups \(A\) and \(B\) of a group \(G\) are said to be totally completely conditionally permutable (tcc-permutable) if \(X\) permutes with \(Y^g\) for some \(g\in \langle X,Y\rangle \) , for all \(X \le A\) and all \(Y\le B\) . In this paper, we study finite products of tcc-permutable subgroups, focussing mainly on structural properties of such products. As an application, new achievements in the context of formation theory are obtained.     

On characterizations of real hypersurface in complex space form with Codazzi type structure Lie operator

In this paper, we prove that if $(\nabla _{X} L_{\xi })Y= (\nabla _{Y} L_{\xi })X$ holds on $M$ , then $M$ is a Hopf hypersurface, where $L_\xi $ denote the induced operator from the Lie derivative with respect to the structure vector field $\xi $ . We characterize such Hopf hypersurfaces of $M_n(c)$ .     

Holding Circles and Fixing Frames

A circle $C$ holds a convex body $K \subset \mathbb {R}^3$ if $K$ can’t be moved far away from its position without intersecting $C$ . One of our results says that there is a convex body $K \subset \mathbb {R}^3$ such that the set of radii of all circles holding $K$ has infinitely many components. Another result says that the circle is unique in the sense that every frame different from the circle holds a convex body $K$ (actually a tetrahedron) so that every nontrivial rigid motion of $K$ intersects the frame.     

Toric partial density functions and stability of toric varieties

Let $(L, h)\rightarrow (X, \omega )$ denote a polarized toric Kähler manifold. Fix a toric submanifold $Y$ and denote by $\hat{\rho }_{tk}:X\rightarrow \mathbb {R}$ the partial density function corresponding to the partial Bergman kernel projecting smooth sections of $L^k$ onto holomorphic sections of $L^k$ that vanish to order at least $tk$ along $Y$ , for fixed $t>0$ such that $tk\in \mathbb {N}$ . We prove the existence of a distributional expansion of $\hat{\rho }_{tk}$ as $k\rightarrow \infty $ , including the identification of the coefficient of $k^{n-1}$ as a distribution on $X$ . This expansion is used to give a direct proof that if $\omega $ has constant scalar curvature, then $(X, L)$ must be slope semi-stable with respect to $Y$ (cf. Ross and Thomas in J Differ Geom 72(3): 429–466, 2006). Similar results are also obtained for more general partial density functions. These results have analogous applications to the study of toric K-stability of toric varieties.     

The topology of parabolic character varieties of free groups

Let $G$ be a complex affine algebraic reductive group, and let $K\,\subset \, G$ be a maximal compact subgroup. Fix h $\,:=\,(h_{1}\,,\ldots \,,h_{m})\,\in \, K^{m}$ . For $n\, \ge \, 0$ , let $\mathsf X _{\mathbf{{h}},n}^{G}$ (respectively, $\mathsf X _{\mathbf{{h}},n}^{K}$ ) be the space of equivalence classes of representations of the free group on $m+n$ generators in $G$ (respectively, $K$ ) such that for each $1\le i\le m$ , the image of the $i$ -th free generator is conjugate to $h_{i}$ . These spaces are parabolic analogues of character varieties of free groups. We prove that $\mathsf X _{\mathbf{{h}},n}^{K}$ is a strong deformation retraction of $\mathsf X _{\mathbf{{h}},n}^{G}$ . In particular, $\mathsf X _{\mathbf{{h}},n}^{G}$ and $\mathsf X _{\mathbf{{h}},n}^{K}$ are homotopy equivalent. We also describe explicit examples relating $\mathsf X _{\mathbf{{h}},n}^{G}$ to relative character varieties.     

A Characterization of Compact Operators Via the Non-Connectedness of the Attractors of a Family of IFSs

In this paper we present a result which establishes a connection between the theory of compact operators and the theory of iterated function systems. For a Banach space $X$ , $S$ and $T$ bounded linear operators from $X$ to $X$ such that $\Vert S\Vert , \Vert T\Vert <1$ and $w\in X$ , let us consider the IFS $\mathcal S _{w}=(X,f_{1},f_{2})$ , where $f_{1},f_{2}:X\rightarrow X$ are given by $f_{1}(x)=S(x)$ and $f_{2}(x)=T(x)+w$ , for all $x\in X$ . On one hand we prove that if the operator $S$ is compact, then there exists a family $(K_{n})_{n\in \mathbb N }$ of compact subsets of $X$ such that $A_{\mathcal S _{w}}$ is not connected, for all $w\in X-\bigcup _{n\in \mathbb N } K_{n}$ . On the other hand we prove that if $H$ is an infinite dimensional Hilbert space, then a bounded linear operator $S:H\rightarrow H$ having the property that $\Vert S\Vert <1$ is compact provided that for every bounded linear operator $T:H\rightarrow H$ such that $\Vert T\Vert <1$ there exists a sequence $(K_{T,n})_{n}$ of compact subsets of $H$ such that $A_{\mathcal S _{w}}$ is not connected for all $w\in H-\bigcup _{n}K_{T,n}$ . Consequently, given an infinite dimensional Hilbert space $H$ , there exists a complete characterization of the compactness of an operator $S:H\rightarrow H$ by means of the non-connectedness of the attractors of a family of IFSs related to the given operator. Finally we present three examples illustrating our results.     

\alpha -Admissibility for Ritt Operators

Let $T:X\rightarrow X$ be a power bounded operator on Banach space. An operator $C:X\rightarrow Y$ is called admissible for $T$ if it satisfies an estimate $\sum _k\Vert CT^k(x)\Vert ^2\,\le M^2\Vert x\Vert ^2$ . Following Harper and Wynn, we study the validity of a certain Weiss conjecture in this discrete setting. We show that when $X$ is reflexive and $T$ is a Ritt operator satisfying a appropriate square function estimate, $C$ is admissible for $T$ if and only if it satisfies a uniform estimate $(1-\vert \omega \vert ^2)^{\frac{1}{2}}\Vert C(I-\omega T)^{-1}\Vert \,\le K\,$ for $\omega \in \mathbb{C }$ , $\vert \omega \vert <1$ . We extend this result to the more general setting of $\alpha $ -admissibility. Then we investigate a natural variant of admissibility involving $R$ -boundedness and provide examples to which our general results apply.     

Many Empty Triangles have a Common Edge

Given a finite point set $X$ X in the plane, the degree of a pair $\{x,y\} \subset X$ { x , y } ? X is the number of empty triangles $t=\mathrm {conv} \{x,y,z\},$ t = conv { x , y , z } , where empty means $t\cap X=\{x,y,z\}.$ t ∩ X = { x , y , z } . Define $\deg X$ deg X as the maximal degree of a pair in $X.$ X . Our main result is that if $X$ X is a random sample of $n$ n independent and uniform points from a fixed convex body, then $\deg X \ge cn/\ln n$ deg X ≥ cn / ln n in expectation.     

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.     

On the topology of semi-algebraic functions on closed semi-algebraic sets

We consider a closed semi-algebraic set ${X \subset \mathbb{R}^n}$ and a C ² semi-algebraic function ${f : \mathbb{R}^n \rightarrow\mathbb{R}}$ such that ${f_{\vert X}}$ has a finite number of critical points. We relate the topology of X to the topology of the sets ${X \cap \{ f * \alpha \}}$ , where ${* \in \{\le,=,\ge \}}$ and ${\alpha \in \mathbb{R}}$ , and the indices of the critical points of ${f_{\vert X}}$ and ${-f_{\vert X}}$ . We also relate the topology of X to the topology of the links at infinity of the sets ${X \cap \{ f * \alpha\}}$ and the indices of these critical points. We give applications when ${X=\mathbb{R}^n}$ and when f is a generic linear function.     

Maximal Equilateral Sets

A subset of a normed space $X$ X is called equilateral if the distance between any two points is the same. Let $m(X)$ m ( X ) be the smallest possible size of an equilateral subset of $X$ X maximal with respect to inclusion. We first observe that Petty’s construction of a $d$ d - $X$ X of any finite dimension $d\ge 4$ d ≥ 4 with $m(X)=4$ m ( X ) = 4 can be generalised to give $m(X\oplus _1\mathbb R )=4$ m ( X ⊕ 1 R ) = 4 for any $X$ X of dimension at least $2$ 2 which has a smooth point on its unit sphere. By a construction involving Hadamard matrices we then show that for any set $\Gamma $ Γ , $m(\ell _p(\Gamma ))$ m ( ? p ( Γ ) ) is finite and bounded above by a function of $p$ p , for all $1\le p<2$ 1 ≤ p < 2 . Also, for all $p\in [1,\infty )$ p ∈ [ 1 , ∞ ) and $d\in \mathbb N $ d ∈ N there exists $c=c(p,d)>1$ c = c ( p , d ) > 1 such that $m(X)\le d+1$ m ( X ) ≤ d + 1 for all $d$ d - $X$ X with Banach–Mazur distance less than $c$ c from $\ell _p^d$ ? p d . Using Brouwer’s fixed-point theorem we show that $m(X)\le d+1$ m ( X ) ≤ d + 1 for all $d$ d - $X$ X with Banach–Mazur distance less than $3/2$ 3 / 2 from $\ell _\infty ^d$ ? ∞ d . A graph-theoretical argument furthermore shows that $m(\ell _\infty ^d)=d+1$ m ( ? ∞ d ) = d + 1 . The above results lead us to conjecture that $m(X)\le 1+\dim X$ m ( X ) ≤ 1 + dim X for all finite-normed spaces $X$ X .     

Varieties Generated by Wreath Products of Abelian Groups

This paper is a survey of our recent results concerning metabelian varieties, and more specifically, varieties generated by wreath products of Abelian groups. We give a full classification of cases where sets of wreath products of Abelian groups $ \mathfrak{X} $ Wr $ \mathfrak{Y} $ = { X Wr Y | X ∈ $ \mathfrak{X} $ , Y ∈ $ \mathfrak{Y} $ } and $ \mathfrak{X} $ wr $ \mathfrak{Y} $ = {X wr Y | X ∈ $ \mathfrak{X} $ , Y ∈ $ \mathfrak{Y} $ } generate the product variety $ \mathfrak{X} $ var ( $ \mathfrak{Y} $ ).     

Limit theorems for von Mises statistics of a measure preserving transformation

For a measure preserving transformation \(T\) of a probability space \((X,\mathcal{F },\mu )\) and some \(d \ge 1\) we investigate almost sure and distributional convergence of random variables of the form $$\begin{aligned} x \rightarrow \frac{1}{C_n} \sum _{0\le i_1,\ldots ,\,i_d where \(C_1, C_2,\ldots \) are normalizing constants and the kernel \(f\) belongs to an appropriate subspace in some \(L_p(X^d\!,\, \mathcal{F }^{\otimes d}\!,\,\mu ^d)\) . We establish a form of the individual ergodic theorem for such sequences. Using a filtration compatible with \(T\) and the martingale approximation, we prove a central limit theorem in the non-degenerate case; for a class of canonical (totally degenerate) kernels and \(d=2\) , we also show that the convergence holds in distribution towards a quadratic form \(\sum _{m=1}^{\infty } \lambda _m\eta ^2_m\) in independent standard Gaussian variables \(\eta _1, \eta _2, \ldots \) .     

On the non-existence of maximal difference matrices of deficiency 1

A \(k\times u\lambda \) matrix \(M=[d_{ij}]\) with entries from a group \(U\) of order \(u\) is called a \((u,k,\lambda )\) -difference matrix over \(U\) if the list of quotients \(d_{i\ell }{d_{j\ell }}^{-1}, 1 \le \ell \le u\lambda ,\) contains each element of \(U\) exactly \(\lambda \) times for all \(i\ne j.\) Jungnickel has shown that \(k \le u\lambda \) and it is conjectured that the equality holds only if \(U\) is a \(p\) -group for a prime \(p.\) On the other hand, Winterhof has shown that some known results on the non-existence of \((u,u\lambda ,\lambda )\) -difference matrices are extended to \((u,u\lambda -1,\lambda )\) -difference matrices. This fact suggests us that there is a close connection between these two cases. In this article we show that any \((u,u\lambda -1,\lambda )\) -difference matrix over an abelian \(p\) -group can be extended to a \((u,u\lambda ,\lambda )\) -difference matrix.     

On the bicanonical map of primitive varieties with q(X) = \mathrm{dim }X: the degree and the Euler number

Let $X$ be a variety of maximal Albanese dimension and of general type. Assume that $q(X) = \mathrm{dim }X$ , the Albanese variety $\mathrm {Alb} (X)$ is a simple abelian variety, and the bicanonical map is not birational. We prove that the Euler number $\chi (X, \omega _X)$ is equal to 1, and $|2K_X|$ separates two distinct points over the same general point on $\mathrm {Alb} (X)$ via $\mathrm {alb}_X$ (Theorem 1.1).