Pseudomoments of the Riemann zeta-function and pseudomagic squares

We compute integral moments of partial sums of the Riemann zeta function on the critical line and obtain an expression for the leading coefficient as a product of the standard arithmetic factor and a geometric factor. The geometric factor is equal to the volume of the convex polytope of substochastic matrices and is equal to the leading coefficient in the expression for moments of truncated characteristic polynomial of a random unitary matrix

Magic squares and the symmetric group

Diaconis and Gamburd computed moments of secular coefficients in the CUE ensemble. We use the characteristic map to give a new combinatorial proof of their result. We also extend their computation to moments of traces of symmetric powers, where the same result holds but in a wider range.Comment: 5 page

Enumerating contingency tables via random permanents

Given m positive integers R=(r_i), n positive integers C=(c_j) such that sum r_i = sum c_j =N, and mn non-negative weights W=(w_{ij}), we consider the total weight T=T(R, C; W) of non-negative integer matrices (contingency tables) D=(d_{ij}) with the row sums r_i, column sums c_j, and the weight of D equal to prod w_{ij}^{d_{ij}}. We present a randomized algorithm of a polynomial in N complexity which computes a number T'=T'(R,C; W) such that T' < T < alpha(R, C) T' where alpha(R,C) = min{prod r_i! r_i^{-r_i}, prod c_j! c_j^{-c_j}} N^N/N!. In many cases, ln T' provides an asymptotically accurate estimate of ln T. The idea of the algorithm is to express T as the expectation of the permanent of an N x N random matrix with exponentially distributed entries and approximate the expectation by the integral T' of an efficiently computable log-concave function on R^{mn}. Applications to counting integer flows in graphs are also discussed.Comment: 19 pages, bounds are sharpened, references are adde

Combinatorics and Geometry of Transportation Polytopes: An Update

A transportation polytope consists of all multidimensional arrays or tables of non-negative real numbers that satisfy certain sum conditions on subsets of the entries. They arise naturally in optimization and statistics, and also have interest for discrete mathematics because permutation matrices, latin squares, and magic squares appear naturally as lattice points of these polytopes. In this paper we survey advances on the understanding of the combinatorics and geometry of these polyhedra and include some recent unpublished results on the diameter of graphs of these polytopes. In particular, this is a thirty-year update on the status of a list of open questions last visited in the 1984 book by Yemelichev, Kovalev and Kravtsov and the 1986 survey paper of Vlach.Comment: 35 pages, 13 figure

Secular Coefficients and the Holomorphic Multiplicative Chaos

We study the secular coefficients of $N \times N$ random unitary matrices $U_{N}$ drawn from the Circular $\beta$-Ensemble, which are defined as the coefficients of $\{z^n\}$ in the characteristic polynomial $\det(1-zU_{N}^{*})$. When $\beta > 4$ we obtain a new class of limiting distributions that arise when both $n$ and $N$ tend to infinity simultaneously. We solve an open problem of Diaconis and Gamburd by showing that for $\beta=2$, the middle coefficient tends to zero as $N \to \infty$. We show how the theory of Gaussian multiplicative chaos (GMC) plays a prominent role in these problems and in the explicit description of the obtained limiting distributions. We extend the remarkable magic square formula of Diaconis and Gamburd for the moments of secular coefficients to all $\beta>0$ and analyse the asymptotic behaviour of the moments. We obtain estimates on the order of magnitude of the secular coefficients for all $\beta > 0,$ and these estimates are sharp when $\beta \geq 2$. These insights motivated us to introduce a new stochastic object associated with the secular coefficients, which we call Holomorphic Multiplicative Chaos (HMC). Viewing the HMC as a random distribution, we prove a sharp result about its regularity in an appropriate Sobolev space. Our proofs expose and exploit several novel connections with other areas, including random permutations, Tauberian theorems and combinatorics

On a conjecture of Wilf

Let n and k be natural numbers and let S(n,k) denote the Stirling numbers of the second kind. It is a conjecture of Wilf that the alternating sum \sum_{j=0}^{n} (-1)^{j} S(n,j) is nonzero for all n>2. We prove this conjecture for all n not congruent to 2 and not congruent to 2944838 modulo 3145728 and discuss applications of this result to graph theory, multiplicative partition functions, and the irrationality of p-adic series.Comment: 18 pages, final version, accepted for publication in the Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series