Lazy visibility evaluation for exact soft shadows

International audienceThis report presents a novel approach to compute high quality and alias-free soft shadows using exact visibility computations. This work relies on a theoritical framework allowing to group lines according to the geometry they intersect. From this study, we derive a new algorithm encoding lazily the visibility from a polygon. Contrary to previous works on from-polygon visibility, our approach is very robust and straightforward to implement. We apply this algorithm to solve exactly and efficiently the visibility of an area light source from any point in a scene. As a consequence, results are not sensitive to noise, contrary to soft shadows methods based on area light source sampling. We demonstrate the reliability of our approach on different scenes and configurations

Computation and Physics in Algebraic Geometry

Physics provides new, tantalizing problems that we solve by developing and implementing innovative and effective geometric tools in nonlinear algebra. The techniques we employ also rely on numerical and symbolic computations performed with computer algebra. First, we study solutions to the Kadomtsev-Petviashvili equation that arise from singular curves. The Kadomtsev-Petviashvili equation is a partial differential equation describing nonlinear wave motion whose solutions can be built from an algebraic curve. Such a surprising connection established by Krichever and Shiota also led to an entirely new point of view on a classical problem in algebraic geometry known as the Schottky problem. To explore the connection with curves with at worst nodal singularities, we define the Hirota variety, which parameterizes KP solutions arising from such curves. Studying the geometry of the Hirota variety provides a new approach to the Schottky problem. We investigate it for irreducible rational nodal curves, giving a partial solution to the weak Schottky problem in this case. Second, we formulate questions from scattering amplitudes in a broader context using very affine varieties and D-module theory. The interplay between geometry and combinatorics in particle physics indeed suggests an underlying, coherent mathematical structure behind the study of particle interactions. In this thesis, we gain a better understanding of mathematical objects, such as moduli spaces of point configurations and generalized Euler integrals, for which particle physics provides concrete, non-trivial examples, and we prove some conjectures stated in the physics literature. Finally, we study linear spaces of symmetric matrices, addressing questions motivated by algebraic statistics, optimization, and enumerative geometry. This includes giving explicit formulas for the maximum likelihood degree and studying tangency problems for quadric surfaces in projective space from the point of view of real algebraic geometry

Lazy visibility evaluation for exact soft shadows

Présentation invitée de l'article du même nom publié en 2012 dans la revue Computer Graphics Forum.International audienceThis paper presents a novel approach to compute high quality and noise-free soft shadows using exact visibility computations. This work relies on a theoretical framework allowing to group lines according to the geometry they intersect. From this study, we derive a new algorithm encoding lazily the visibility from a polygon. Contrary to previous works on from-polygon visibility, our approach is very robust and straightforward to implement. We apply this algorithm to solve exactly and efficiently the visibility of an area light source from any point in a scene. As a consequence, results are not sensitive to noise, contrary to soft shadows methods based on area light source sampling. We demonstrate the reliability of our approach on different scenes and configurations

Generalized RSK for enumerating projective maps from n-pointed curves

Includes bibliographical references.2022 Fall.Schubert calculus has been studied since the 1800s, ever since the mathematician Hermann Schubert studied the intersections of lines and planes. Since then, it has grown to have a plethora of connections to enumerative geometry and algebraic combinatorics alike. These connections give us a way of using Schubert calculus to translate geometric problems into combinatorial ones, and vice versa. In this thesis, we define several combinatorial objects known as Young tableaux, as well as the well-known RSK correspondence between pairs of tableaux and sequences. We also define the Grassmannian space, as well as the Schubert cells that live inside it. Then, we describe how Schubert calculus and the Littlewood-Richardson rule allow us to turn problems of intersecting geometric spaces into ones of counting Young tableaux with particular characteristics. We give a combinatorial proof of a recent geometric result of Farkas and Lian on linear series on curves with prescribed incidence conditions. The result states that the expected number of degree-d morphisms from a general genus g, n-marked curve C to Pr, sending the marked points on C to specified general points in Pr, is equal to (r + 1)g for sufficiently large d. This computation may be rephrased as an intersection problem on Grassmannians, which has a natural combinatorial interpretation in terms of Young tableaux by the classical Littlewood-Richardson rule. We give a bijection, generalizing the well-known RSK correspondence, between the tableaux in question and the (r + 1)-ary sequences of length g, and we explore our bijection's combinatorial properties. We also apply similar methods to give a combinatorial interpretation and proof of the fact that, in the modified setting in which r = 1 and several marked points map to the same point in P1, the number of morphisms is still 2g for sufficiently large d

Quartic Curves and Their Bitangents

A smooth quartic curve in the complex projective plane has 36 inequivalent representations as a symmetric determinant of linear forms and 63 representations as a sum of three squares. These correspond to Cayley octads and Steiner complexes respectively. We present exact algorithms for computing these objects from the 28 bitangents. This expresses Vinnikov quartics as spectrahedra and positive quartics as Gram matrices. We explore the geometry of Gram spectrahedra and we find equations for the variety of Cayley octads. Interwoven is an exposition of much of the 19th century theory of plane quartics.Comment: 26 pages, 3 figures, added references, fixed theorems 4.3 and 7.8, other minor change

The positive tropical Grassmannian, the hypersimplex, and the m=2 amplituhedron

© The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.The study of the moment map from the Grassmannian to the hypersimplex, and the relation between torus orbits and matroid polytopes, dates back to the foundational 1987 work of Gelfand-Goresky-MacPherson-Serganova. On the other hand, the amplituhedron is a very new object, defined by Arkani-Hamed-Trnka in connection with scattering amplitudes in $\mathcal{N}=4$ super Yang-Mills theory. In this paper we discover a striking duality between the moment map $\mu:Gr^{\geq0}_{k+1,n}\to\Delta_{k+1,n}$ from the positive Grassmannian $Gr^{\geq0}_{k+1,n}$ to the hypersimplex, and the amplituhedron map $\tilde{Z}:Gr^{\geq0}_{k,n}\to\mathcal{A}_{n,k,2}(Z)$ from $Gr^{\geq0}_{k,n}$ to the $m=2$ amplituhedron. We consider the positroid dissections of both objects, which informally, are subdivisions of $\Delta_{k+1,n}$ (respectively, $\mathcal{A}_{n,k,2}(Z)$) into a disjoint union of images of positroid cells of the positive Grassmannian. At first glance, $\Delta_{k+1,n}$ and $\mathcal{A}_{n,k,2}(Z)$ seem very different - the former is an $(n-1)$-dimensional polytope, while the latter is a $2k$-dimensional non-polytopal subset of $Gr_{k,k+2}$. Nevertheless, we conjecture that positroid dissections of $\Delta_{k+1,n}$ are in bijection with positroid dissections of $\mathcal{A}_{n,k,2}(Z)$ via a map we call T-duality. We prove this conjecture for the (infinite) class of BCFW dissections and give additional experimental evidence. Moreover, we prove that the positive tropical Grassmannian is the secondary fan for the regular positroid subdivisions of the hypersimplex, and propose that it also controls the T-dual positroid subdivisions of the amplituhedron. Along the way, we prove that a matroid polytope is a positroid polytope if and only if all two-dimensional faces are positroid polytopes. Towards the goal of generalizing T-duality for higher $m$, we also define the momentum amplituhedron for any even $m$.Peer reviewe