An Abstraction of Whitney's Broken Circuit Theorem

We establish a broad generalization of Whitney's broken circuit theorem on the chromatic polynomial of a graph to sums of type $\sum_{A\subseteq S} f(A)$ where $S$ is a finite set and $f$ is a mapping from the power set of $S$ into an abelian group. We give applications to the domination polynomial and the subgraph component polynomial of a graph, the chromatic polynomial of a hypergraph, the characteristic polynomial and Crapo's beta invariant of a matroid, and the principle of inclusion-exclusion. Thus, we discover several known and new results in a concise and unified way. As further applications of our main result, we derive a new generalization of the maximums-minimums identity and of a theorem due to Blass and Sagan on the M\"obius function of a finite lattice, which generalizes Rota's crosscut theorem. For the classical M\"obius function, both Euler's totient function and its Dirichlet inverse, and the reciprocal of the Riemann zeta function we obtain new expansions involving the greatest common divisor resp. least common multiple. We finally establish an even broader generalization of Whitney's broken circuit theorem in the context of convex geometries (antimatroids).Comment: 18 page

A note on the homotopy type of the Alexander dual

We investigate the homotopy type of the Alexander dual of a simplicial complex. It is known that in general the homotopy type of K does not determine the homotopy type of its dual K∗ . We construct for each finitely presented group G, a simply connected simplicial complex K such that π1(K∗ ) = G and study sufficient conditions on K for K∗ to have the homotopy type of a sphere. We extend the simplicial Alexander duality to the more general context of reduced lattices and relate this construction with Bier spheres using deleted joins of lattices. Finally we introduce an alternative dual, in the context of reduced lattices, with the same homotopy type as the Alexander dual but smaller and simpler to compute.Fil: Minian, Elias Gabriel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Investigaciones Matemáticas "Luis A. Santalo". Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Investigaciones Matemáticas "Luis A. Santalo"; ArgentinaFil: Rodríguez, Jorge Tomás. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Investigaciones Matemáticas "Luis A. Santalo". Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Investigaciones Matemáticas "Luis A. Santalo"; Argentin

Lattice congruences, fans and Hopf algebras

We give a unified explanation of the geometric and algebraic properties of two well-known maps, one from permutations to triangulations, and another from permutations to subsets. Furthermore we give a broad generalization of the maps. Specifically, for any lattice congruence of the weak order on a Coxeter group we construct a complete fan of convex cones with strong properties relative to the corresponding lattice quotient of the weak order. We show that if a family of lattice congruences on the symmetric groups satisfies certain compatibility conditions then the family defines a sub Hopf algebra of the Malvenuto-Reutenauer Hopf algebra of permutations. Such a sub Hopf algebra has a basis which is described by a type of pattern-avoidance. Applying these results, we build the Malvenuto-Reutenauer algebra as the limit of an infinite sequence of smaller algebras, where the second algebra in the sequence is the Hopf algebra of non-commutative symmetric functions. We also associate both a fan and a Hopf algebra to a set of permutations which appears to be equinumerous with the Baxter permutations.Comment: 34 pages, 1 figur

Antichain cutsets of strongly connected posets

Rival and Zaguia showed that the antichain cutsets of a finite Boolean lattice are exactly the level sets. We show that a similar characterization of antichain cutsets holds for any strongly connected poset of locally finite height. As a corollary, we get such a characterization for semimodular lattices, supersolvable lattices, Bruhat orders, locally shellable lattices, and many more. We also consider a generalization to strongly connected hypergraphs having finite edges.Comment: 12 pages; v2 contains minor fixes for publicatio