Compactifications of subvarieties of tori

We study compactifications of subvarieties of algebraic tori defined by imposing a sufficiently fine polyhedral structure on their non-archimedean amoebas. These compactifications have many nice properties, for example any k boundary divisors intersect in codimension k. We consider some examples including $M_{0,n}\subset\bar M_{0,n}$ (and more generally log canonical models of complements of hyperplane arrangements) and compact quotients of Grassmannians by a maximal torus.Comment: 14 pages, submitted versio

The matroid secretary problem for minor-closed classes and random matroids

We prove that for every proper minor-closed class $M$ of matroids representable over a prime field, there exists a constant-competitive matroid secretary algorithm for the matroids in $M$. This result relies on the extremely powerful matroid minor structure theory being developed by Geelen, Gerards and Whittle. We also note that for asymptotically almost all matroids, the matroid secretary algorithm that selects a random basis, ignoring weights, is $(2+o(1))$-competitive. In fact, assuming the conjecture that almost all matroids are paving, there is a $(1+o(1))$-competitive algorithm for almost all matroids.Comment: 15 pages, 0 figure

Linearly dependent vectorial decomposition of clutters

This paper deals with the question of completing a monotone increasing family of subsets of a finite set to obtain the linearly dependent subsets of a family of vectors of a vector space. Specifically, we demonstrate that such vectorial completions of the family of subsets ¿ exist and, in addition, we show that the minimal vectorial completions of the family ¿ provide a decomposition of the clutter of the inclusion-minimal elements of ¿. The computation of such vectorial decomposition of clutters is also discussed in some cases.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft

Short rainbow cycles in graphs and matroids

Let $G$ be a simple $n$-vertex graph and $c$ be a colouring of $E(G)$ with $n$ colours, where each colour class has size at least $2$. We prove that $(G,c)$ contains a rainbow cycle of length at most $\lceil \frac{n}{2} \rceil$, which is best possible. Our result settles a special case of a strengthening of the Caccetta-H\"aggkvist conjecture, due to Aharoni. We also show that the matroid generalization of our main result also holds for cographic matroids, but fails for binary matroids.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figure

Covering Vectors by Spaces: Regular Matroids

We consider the problem of covering a set of vectors of a given finite dimensional linear space (vector space) by a subspace generated by a set of vectors of minimum size. Specifically, we study the Space Cover problem, where we are given a matrix M and a subset of its columns T; the task is to find a minimum set F of columns of M disjoint with T such that that the linear span of F contains all vectors of T. This is a fundamental problem arising in different domains, such as coding theory, machine learning, and graph algorithms. We give a parameterized algorithm with running time 2^{O(k)}||M|| ^{O(1)} solving this problem in the case when M is a totally unimodular matrix over rationals, where k is the size of F. In other words, we show that the problem is fixed-parameter tractable parameterized by the rank of the covering subspace. The algorithm is "asymptotically optimal" for the following reasons. Choice of matrices: Vector matroids corresponding to totally unimodular matrices over rationals are exactly the regular matroids. It is known that for matrices corresponding to a more general class of matroids, namely, binary matroids, the problem becomes W[1]-hard being parameterized by k. Choice of the parameter: The problem is NP-hard even if |T|=3 on matrix-representations of a subclass of regular matroids, namely cographic matroids. Thus for a stronger parameterization, like by the size of T, the problem becomes intractable. Running Time: The exponential dependence in the running time of our algorithm cannot be asymptotically improved unless Exponential Time Hypothesis (ETH) fails. Our algorithm exploits the classical decomposition theorem of Seymour for regular matroids