48 research outputs found
A study of discrepancy results in partially ordered sets
In 2001, Fishburn, Tanenbaum, and Trenk published a pair of papers that introduced the notions of linear and weak discrepancy of a partially ordered set or poset. Linear discrepancy for a poset is the least k such that for any ordering of the points in the poset there is a pair of incomparable points at least distance k away in the ordering. Weak discrepancy is similar to linear discrepancy except that the distance is observed over weak labelings (i.e. two points can have the same label if they are incomparable, but order is still preserved). My thesis gives a variety of results pertaining to these properties and other forms of discrepancy in posets. The first chapter of my thesis partially answers a question of Fishburn, Tanenbaum, and Trenk that was to characterize those posets with linear discrepancy two. It makes the characterization for those posets with width two and references the paper where the full characterization is given. The second chapter introduces the notion of t-discrepancy which is similar to weak discrepancy except only the weak labelings with
at most t copies of any label are considered. This chapter shows that determining a poset's t-discrepancy is NP-Complete. It also gives the t-discrepancy for the disjoint sum of chains and provides a polynomial time algorithm for determining t-discrepancy of semiorders. The third chapter presents another notion of discrepancy namely total discrepancy which minimizes the average distance between incomparable elements. This chapter proves that finding this value can be done in polynomial time unlike linear discrepancy and t-discrepancy. The final chapter answers another question of Fishburn, Tanenbaum, and Trenk that asked to characterize those posets that have equal linear and weak discrepancies. Though determining the answer of whether the weak discrepancy and linear discrepancy of a poset are equal is an NP-Complete problem, the set of minimal posets that have this property are given. At the end of the thesis I discuss two other open problems not mentioned in the previous chapters that relate to linear discrepancy. The first asks if there is a link between a poset's dimension and its linear discrepancy. The second refers to approximating linear discrepancy and possible ways to do it.Ph.D.Committee Chair: Trotter, William T.; Committee Member: Dieci, Luca; Committee Member: Duke, Richard; Committee Member: Randall, Dana; Committee Member: Tetali, Prasa
Wonderful Compactifications in Quantum Field Theory
This article reviews the use of DeConcini-Procesi wonderful models in
renormalization of ultraviolet divergences in position space as introduced by
Bergbauer, Brunetti and Kreimer. In contrast to the exposition there we employ
a slightly different approach; instead of the subspaces in the arrangement of
divergent loci, we use the poset of divergent subgraphs as the main tool to
describe the whole renormalization process. This is based on an article by
Feichtner, where wonderful models were studied from a purely combinatorial
viewpoint. The main motivation for this approach is the fact that both,
renormalization and the model construction, are governed by the combinatorics
of this poset. Not only simplifies this the exposition considerably, but also
allows to study the renormalization operators in more detail. Moreover, we
explore the renormalization group in this setting by studying how the
renormalized distributions behave under a change of renormalization points
The Relativized Second Eigenvalue Conjecture of Alon
We prove a relativization of the Alon Second Eigenvalue Conjecture for all
-regular base graphs, , with : for any , we show that
a random covering map of degree to has a new eigenvalue greater than
in absolute value with probability .
Furthermore, if is a Ramanujan graph, we show that this probability is
proportional to , where
is an integer depending on , which can be computed by a finite algorithm for
any fixed . For any -regular graph, , is
greater than .
Our proof introduces a number of ideas that simplify and strengthen the
methods of Friedman's proof of the original conjecture of Alon. The most
significant new idea is that of a ``certified trace,'' which is not only
greatly simplifies our trace methods, but is the reason we can obtain the
estimate above. This estimate represents an
improvement over Friedman's results of the original Alon conjecture for random
-regular graphs, for certain values of
LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volume
LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volum