Polygons as Sections of Higher-Dimensional Polytopes

We show that every heptagon is a section of a 3-polytope with 6 vertices. This implies that every n-gon with n≥7 can be obtained as a section of a (2+⌊n7⌋)-dimensional polytope with at most ⌈6n7⌉ vertices; and provides a geometric proof of the fact that every nonnegative n×m matrix of rank 3 has nonnegative rank not larger than ⌈6min(n,m)7⌉. This result has been independently proved, algebraically, by Shitov (J. Combin. Theory Ser. A 122, 2014)

Existence of symmetric central configurations

Central configurations have been of great interest over many years, with the earliest examples due to Euler and Lagrange. There are numerous results in the literature demonstrating the existence of central configurations with specific symmetry properties, using slightly different techniques in each. The aim here is to describe a uniform approach by adapting to the symmetric case the well-known variational argument showing the existence of central configurations. The principal conclusion is that there is a central configuration for every possible symmetry type, and for any symmetric choice of masses. Finally the same argument is applied to the class of balanced configurations introduced by Albouy and Chenciner.Comment: 14 pages, to appear in Cel Mech and Dyn Ast

Quantum automorphism groups of homogeneous graphs

Associated to a finite graph $X$ is its quantum automorphism group $G$. The main problem is to compute the Poincar\'e series of $G$, meaning the series $f(z)=1+c_1z+c_2z^2+...$ whose coefficients are multiplicities of 1 into tensor powers of the fundamental representation. In this paper we find a duality between certain quantum groups and planar algebras, which leads to a planar algebra formulation of the problem. Together with some other results, this gives $f$ for all homogeneous graphs having 8 vertices or less.Comment: 30 page