New light on Bergman complexes by decomposing matroid types

Bergman complexes are polyhedral complexes associated to matroids. Faces of these complexes are certain matroids, called matroid types, too. In order to understand the structure of these faces we decompose matroid types into direct summands. Ardila/Klivans proved that the Bergman Complex of a matroid can be subdivided into the order complex of the proper part of its lattice of flats. Beyond that Feichtner/Sturmfels showed that the Bergman complex can even be subdivided to the even coarser nested set complex. We will give a much shorter and more general proof of this fact. Generalizing formulas proposed by Ardila/Klivans and Feichtner/Sturmfels for special cases, we present a decomposition into direct sums working for faces of any of these complexes. Additionally we show that it is the finest possible decomposition for faces of the Bergman complex.Comment: 18 pages, 1 figure, based on my diploma thesi

Geometric, Algebraic, and Topological Combinatorics

The 2019 Oberwolfach meeting "Geometric, Algebraic and Topological Combinatorics" was organized by Gil Kalai (Jerusalem), Isabella Novik (Seattle), Francisco Santos (Santander), and Volkmar Welker (Marburg). It covered a wide variety of aspects of Discrete Geometry, Algebraic Combinatorics with geometric flavor, and Topological Combinatorics. Some of the highlights of the conference included (1) Karim Adiprasito presented his very recent proof of the $g$-conjecture for spheres (as a talk and as a "Q\&A" evening session) (2) Federico Ardila gave an overview on "The geometry of matroids", including his recent extension with Denham and Huh of previous work of Adiprasito, Huh and Katz

Matroidal Cayley-Bacharach and independence/dependence of geometric properties of matroids

We consider the relationship between a matroidal analogue of the degree $a$ Cayley-Bacharach property (finite sets of points failing to impose independent conditions on degree $a$ hypersurfaces) and geometric properties of matroids. If the matroid polytopes in question are nestohedra, we show that the minimal degree matroidal Cayley-Bacharach property denoted $MCB(a)$ is determined by the structure of the building sets used to construct them. This analysis also applies for other degrees $a$. Also, it does not seem to affect the combinatorial equivalence class of the matroid polytope. However, there are close connections to minimal nontrivial degrees $a$ and the geometry of the matroids in question for paving matroids (which are conjecturally generic among matroids of a given rank) and matroids constructed out of supersolvable hyperplane arrangements. The case of paving matroids is still related to with properties of building sets since it is closely connected to (Hilbert series of) Chow rings of matroids, which are combinatorial models of the cohomology of wonderful compactifications. Finally, our analysis of supersolvable line and hyperplane arrangements give a family of matroids which are natrually related to independence conditions imposed by points one plane curves or can be analyzed recursively.Comment: 16 pages; Comments welcome

Supersolvability of built lattices and Koszulness of generalized Chow rings

We give an explicit quadratic Grobner basis for generalized Chow rings of supersolvable built lattices, with the help of the operadic structure on geometric lattices introduced in a previous article. This shows that the generalized Chow rings associated to minimal building sets of supersolvable lattices are Koszul. As another consequence, we get that the cohomology algebras of the components of the extended modular operad in genus 0 are Koszul.Comment: Second version. Cleaned up a few proofs. Comments are welcom

LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volume

LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volum

IST Austria Thesis

We describe arrangements of three-dimensional spheres from a geometrical and topological point of view. Real data (fitting this setup) often consist of soft spheres which show certain degree of deformation while strongly packing against each other. In this context, we answer the following questions: If we model a soft packing of spheres by hard spheres that are allowed to overlap, can we measure the volume in the overlapped areas? Can we be more specific about the overlap volume, i.e. quantify how much volume is there covered exactly twice, three times, or k times? What would be a good optimization criteria that rule the arrangement of soft spheres while making a good use of the available space? Fixing a particular criterion, what would be the optimal sphere configuration? The first result of this thesis are short formulas for the computation of volumes covered by at least k of the balls. The formulas exploit information contained in the order-k Voronoi diagrams and its closely related Level-k complex. The used complexes lead to a natural generalization into poset diagrams, a theoretical formalism that contains the order-k and degree-k diagrams as special cases. In parallel, we define different criteria to determine what could be considered an optimal arrangement from a geometrical point of view. Fixing a criterion, we find optimal soft packing configurations in 2D and 3D where the ball centers lie on a lattice. As a last step, we use tools from computational topology on real physical data, to show the potentials of higher-order diagrams in the description of melting crystals. The results of the experiments leaves us with an open window to apply the theories developed in this thesis in real applications