Commutative association schemes

Association schemes were originally introduced by Bose and his co-workers in the design of statistical experiments. Since that point of inception, the concept has proved useful in the study of group actions, in algebraic graph theory, in algebraic coding theory, and in areas as far afield as knot theory and numerical integration. This branch of the theory, viewed in this collection of surveys as the "commutative case," has seen significant activity in the last few decades. The goal of the present survey is to discuss the most important new developments in several directions, including Gelfand pairs, cometric association schemes, Delsarte Theory, spin models and the semidefinite programming technique. The narrative follows a thread through this list of topics, this being the contrast between combinatorial symmetry and group-theoretic symmetry, culminating in Schrijver's SDP bound for binary codes (based on group actions) and its connection to the Terwilliger algebra (based on combinatorial symmetry). We propose this new role of the Terwilliger algebra in Delsarte Theory as a central topic for future work.Comment: 36 page

Fourier-Reflexive Partitions and MacWilliams Identities for Additive Codes

A partition of a finite abelian group gives rise to a dual partition on the character group via the Fourier transform. Properties of the dual partitions are investigated and a convenient test is given for the case that the bidual partition coincides the primal partition. Such partitions permit MacWilliams identities for the partition enumerators of additive codes. It is shown that dualization commutes with taking products and symmetrized products of partitions on cartesian powers of the given group. After translating the results to Frobenius rings, which are identified with their character module, the approach is applied to partitions that arise from poset structures

A characterization of Q-polynomial association schemes

We prove a necessary and sufficient condition for a symmetric association scheme to be a Q-polynomial scheme.Comment: 8 pages, no figur

Distance-regular graphs

This is a survey of distance-regular graphs. We present an introduction to distance-regular graphs for the reader who is unfamiliar with the subject, and then give an overview of some developments in the area of distance-regular graphs since the monograph 'BCN' [Brouwer, A.E., Cohen, A.M., Neumaier, A., Distance-Regular Graphs, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1989] was written.Comment: 156 page

Program schemes with deep pushdown storage.

Inspired by recent work of Meduna on deep pushdown automata, we consider the computational power of a class of basic program schemes, TeX, based around assignments, while-loops and non- deterministic guessing but with access to a deep pushdown stack which, apart from having the usual push and pop instructions, also has deep-push instructions which allow elements to be pushed to stack locations deep within the stack. We syntactically define sub-classes of TeX by restricting the occurrences of pops, pushes and deep-pushes and capture the complexity classes NP and PSPACE. Furthermore, we show that all problems accepted by program schemes of TeX are in EXPTIME

Derived Quot schemes

Realizing a part of the Derived Deformation Theory program, we construct a "derived" analog of the Grothendieck's Quot scheme parametrizing subsheaves in a given coherent sheaf F on a smooth projective variety X. This analog is a differential graded manifold RQuot_h(F) (so it is always smooth in an appropriate sense) whose tangent space at a point represented by a subsheaf K in F, is a cochain complex quasiisomorphic to RHom(K, F/K).Comment: 46 pages, AMS-TeX. Revised version, to appear in Ann. Sci. EN