Preservation and decomposition theorems for bounded degree structures

We provide elementary algorithms for two preservation theorems for first-order sentences (FO) on the class \^ad of all finite structures of degree at most d: For each FO-sentence that is preserved under extensions (homomorphisms) on \^ad, a \^ad-equivalent existential (existential-positive) FO-sentence can be constructed in 5-fold (4-fold) exponential time. This is complemented by lower bounds showing that a 3-fold exponential blow-up of the computed existential (existential-positive) sentence is unavoidable. Both algorithms can be extended (while maintaining the upper and lower bounds on their time complexity) to input first-order sentences with modulo m counting quantifiers (FO+MODm). Furthermore, we show that for an input FO-formula, a \^ad-equivalent Feferman-Vaught decomposition can be computed in 3-fold exponential time. We also provide a matching lower bound.Comment: 42 pages and 3 figures. This is the full version of: Frederik Harwath, Lucas Heimberg, and Nicole Schweikardt. Preservation and decomposition theorems for bounded degree structures. In Joint Meeting of the 23rd EACSL Annual Conference on Computer Science Logic (CSL) and the 29th Annual ACM/IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS), CSL-LICS'14, pages 49:1-49:10. ACM, 201

Unions of 3-punctured spheres in hyperbolic 3-manifolds

We classify the topological types for the unions of the totally geodesic 3-punctured spheres in orientable hyperbolic 3-manifolds. General types of the unions appear in various hyperbolic 3-manifolds. Each of the special types of the unions appears only in a single hyperbolic 3-manifold or Dehn fillings of a single hyperbolic 3-manifold. Furthermore, we investigate bounds of the moduli of adjacent cusps for the union of linearly placed 3-punctured spheres.Comment: 40 pages, 32 figures. v2: Section 5 extended, references added, v3: Theorem 1.3 added, which concerns infinitely many 3-punctured spheres, v4: reference added; to appear in Communications in Analysis and Geometr

On the pointwise domination of a function by its maximal function

We show that under rather general circumstances, the almost everywhere pointwise inequality $|f|(x) \le Mf (x)$ is equivalent to a weak form of the Lebesgue density theorem, for totally bounded closed sets. We derive both positive and negative results from this characterization.Comment: 13 pages, incorporates suggestions by a refere

Symmetric ribbon disks

We study the ribbon discs that arise from a symmetric union presentation of a ribbon knot. A natural notion of symmetric ribbon number is introduced and compared with the classical ribbon number. We show that the gap between these numbers can be arbitrarily large by constructing an infinite family of ribbon knots with ribbon number 2 and arbitrarily large symmetric ribbon number. The proof is based on a particularly simple description of symmetric unions in terms of certain band diagrams which leads to an upper bound for the Heegaard genus of their branched double covers.Comment: 9 pages, 10 figures. Few typos corrected. Final version published in JKT

Adaptive Compressed Sensing for Support Recovery of Structured Sparse Sets

This paper investigates the problem of recovering the support of structured signals via adaptive compressive sensing. We examine several classes of structured support sets, and characterize the fundamental limits of accurately recovering such sets through compressive measurements, while simultaneously providing adaptive support recovery protocols that perform near optimally for these classes. We show that by adaptively designing the sensing matrix we can attain significant performance gains over non-adaptive protocols. These gains arise from the fact that adaptive sensing can: (i) better mitigate the effects of noise, and (ii) better capitalize on the structure of the support sets.Comment: to appear in IEEE Transactions on Information Theor