Formal matrix integrals and combinatorics of maps

This article is a short review on the relationship between convergent matrix integrals, formal matrix integrals, and combinatorics of maps. We briefly summarize results developed over the last 30 years, as well as more recent discoveries. We recall that formal matrix integrals are identical to combinatorial generating functions for maps, and that formal matrix integrals are in general very different from convergent matrix integrals. Finally, we give a list of the classical matrix models which have played an important role in physics in the past decades. Some of them are now well understood, some are still difficult challenges.Comment: few misprints corrected, biblio modifie

Subclass Discriminant Analysis of Morphological and Textural Features for HEp-2 Staining Pattern Classification

Classifying HEp-2 fluorescence patterns in Indirect Immunofluorescence (IIF) HEp-2 cell imaging is important for the differential diagnosis of autoimmune diseases. The current technique, based on human visual inspection, is time-consuming, subjective and dependent on the operator's experience. Automating this process may be a solution to these limitations, making IIF faster and more reliable. This work proposes a classification approach based on Subclass Discriminant Analysis (SDA), a dimensionality reduction technique that provides an effective representation of the cells in the feature space, suitably coping with the high within-class variance typical of HEp-2 cell patterns. In order to generate an adequate characterization of the fluorescence patterns, we investigate the individual and combined contributions of several image attributes, showing that the integration of morphological, global and local textural features is the most suited for this purpose. The proposed approach provides an accuracy of the staining pattern classification of about 90%

Probability Theory of Random Polygons from the Quaternionic Viewpoint

We build a new probability measure on closed space and plane polygons. The key construction is a map, given by Knutson and Hausmann using the Hopf map on quaternions, from the complex Stiefel manifold of 2-frames in n-space to the space of closed n-gons in 3-space of total length 2. Our probability measure on polygon space is defined by pushing forward Haar measure on the Stiefel manifold by this map. A similar construction yields a probability measure on plane polygons which comes from a real Stiefel manifold. The edgelengths of polygons sampled according to our measures obey beta distributions. This makes our polygon measures different from those usually studied, which have Gaussian or fixed edgelengths. One advantage of our measures is that we can explicitly compute expectations and moments for chordlengths and radii of gyration. Another is that direct sampling according to our measures is fast (linear in the number of edges) and easy to code. Some of our methods will be of independent interest in studying other probability measures on polygon spaces. We define an edge set ensemble (ESE) to be the set of polygons created by rearranging a given set of n edges. A key theorem gives a formula for the average over an ESE of the squared lengths of chords skipping k vertices in terms of k, n, and the edgelengths of the ensemble. This allows one to easily compute expected values of squared chordlengths and radii of gyration for any probability measure on polygon space invariant under rearrangements of edges.Comment: Some small typos fixed, added a calculation for the covariance of edgelengths, added pseudocode for the random polygon sampling algorithm. To appear in Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics (CPAM

A PDE Approach to the Combinatorics of the Full Map Enumeration Problem: Exact Solutions and their Universal Character

Maps are polygonal cellular networks on Riemann surfaces. This paper completes a program of constructing closed form general representations for the enumerative generating functions associated to maps of fixed but arbitrary genus. These closed form expressions have a universal character in the sense that they are independent of the explicit valence distribution of the tiling polygons. Nevertheless the valence distributions may be recovered from the closed form generating functions by a remarkable {\it unwinding identity} in terms of the Appell polynomials generated by Bessel functions. Our treatment, based on random matrix theory and Riemann-Hilbert problems for orthogonal polynomials reveals the generating functions to be solutions of nonlinear conservation laws and their prolongations. This characterization enables one to gain insights that go beyond more traditional methods that are purely combinatorial. Universality results are connected to stability results for characteristic singularities of conservation laws that were studied by Caflisch, Ercolani, Hou and Landis as well as directly related to universality results for random matrix spectra as described by Deift, Kriecherbauer, McLaughlin, Venakides and Zhou

BFACF-style algorithms for polygons in the body-centered and face-centered cubic lattices

In this paper the elementary moves of the BFACF-algorithm for lattice polygons are generalised to elementary moves of BFACF-style algorithms for lattice polygons in the body-centred (BCC) and face-centred (FCC) cubic lattices. We prove that the ergodicity classes of these new elementary moves coincide with the knot types of unrooted polygons in the BCC and FCC lattices and so expand a similar result for the cubic lattice. Implementations of these algorithms for knotted polygons using the GAS algorithm produce estimates of the minimal length of knotted polygons in the BCC and FCC lattices