Christoffel words and the strong Fox conjecture for two-bridge knots

The trapezoidal Fox conjecture states that the coefficient sequence of the Alexander polynomial of an alternating knot is unimodal. We are motivated by a harder question, the strong Fox conjecture, which asks whether the coefficient sequence of the Alexander polynomial of alternating knots is actually log-concave. Our approach is to introduce a polynomial $\Delta(t)$ associated to a Christoffel word and to prove that its coefficient sequence is log-concave. This implies the strong Fox conjecture for two-bridge knots.Comment: 19 pages; 9 figure

Symmetries and intrinsic vs. extrinsic properties of M‾0,n\overline{\mathcal{M}}_{0, n}

We consider the following question: How much of the combinatorial structure determining properties of $\overline{\mathcal{M}_{0, n}}$ is ``intrinsic'' and how much new information do we obtain from using properties specific to this space? Our approach is to study the effect of the $S_n$-action. Apart from being a natural action to consider, it is known that this action does not extend to other wonderful compactifications associated to the $A_{n - 2}$ hyperplane arrangement. We find the differences in intersection patterns of faces on associahedra and permutohedra which characterize the failure to extend to other compactifications and show that this is reflected by most terms of degree $\ge 2$ of the cohomology/Chow ring. Even from a combinatorial perspective, terms of degree 1 are more naturally related to geometric properties. In particular, imposing $S_n$-invariance implies that many of the log concave sequences obtained from degree 1 Hodge--Riemann relations (and all of them for $n \le 2000$) on the Chow ring of $\overline{\mathcal{M}_{0, n}}$ can be restricted to those with a special recursive structure. A conjectural result implies that this is true for all $n$. Elements of these sequences can be expressed as polynomials in quantum Littlewood--Richardson coefficients multiplied by terms such as partition components, factorials, and multinomial coefficients. After dividing by binomial coefficients, polynomials with these numbers as coefficients can be interepreted in terms of volumes or resultants. Finally, we find a connection between the geometry of $\overline{\mathcal{M}_{0, n}}$ and higher degree Hodge--Riemann relations of other rings via Toeplitz matrices.Comment: 19 pages, Comments welcome

The extremals of the Kahn-Saks inequality

A classical result of Kahn and Saks states that given any partially ordered set with two distinguished elements, the number of linear extensions in which the ranks of the distinguished elements differ by $k$ is log-concave as a function of $k$. The log-concave sequences that can arise in this manner prove to exhibit a much richer structure, however, than is evident from log-concavity alone. The main result of this paper is a complete characterization of the extremals of the Kahn-Saks inequality: we obtain a detailed combinatorial understanding of where and what kind of geometric progressions can appear in these log-concave sequences. This settles a partial conjecture of Chan-Pak-Panova, while the analysis uncovers new extremals that were not previously conjectured. The proof relies on a much more general geometric mechanism -- a hard Lefschetz theorem for nef classes that was obtained in the setting of convex polytopes by Shenfeld and Van Handel -- which forms a model for the investigation of such structures in other combinatorial problems.Comment: 29 pages, 1 figur