A sharp centro-affine isospectral inequality of Szeg\"{o}--Weinberger type and the LpL^p-Minkowski problem

We establish a sharp upper-bound for the first non-zero even eigenvalue (corresponding to an even eigenfunction) of the Hilbert-Brunn-Minkowski operator associated to a strictly convex $C^2$-smooth origin-symmetric convex body $K$ in $\mathbb{R}^n$. Our isospectral inequality is centro-affine invariant, attaining equality if and only if $K$ is a (centered) ellipsoid; this is reminiscent of the (non affine invariant) classical Szeg\"{o}--Weinberger isospectral inequality for the Neumann Laplacian. The new upper-bound complements the conjectural lower-bound, which has been shown to be equivalent to the log-Brunn-Minkowski inequality and is intimately related to the uniqueness question in the even log-Minkowski problem. As applications, we obtain new strong non-uniqueness results in the even $L^p$-Minkowski problem in the subcritical range $-n < p < 0$, as well as new rigidity results for the critical exponent $p=-n$ and supercritical regime $p < -n$. In particular, we show that any $K$ as above which is not an ellipsoid is a witness to non-uniqueness for all $p \in (-n,p_K)$ and some $p_K \in (-n,0)$, and that $p_K$ can be taken to be arbitrarily close to $0$.Comment: 30 page

Outer limit of subdifferentials and calmness moduli in linear and nonlinear programming

With a common background and motivation, the main contributions of this paper are developed in two different directions. Firstly, we are concerned with functions which are the maximum of a finite amount of continuously differentiable functions of n real variables, paying attention to the case of polyhedral functions. For these max-functions, we obtain some results about outer limits of subdifferentials, which are applied to derive an upper bound for the calmness modulus of nonlinear systems. When confined to the convex case, in addition, a lower bound on this modulus is also obtained. Secondly, by means of a KKT index set approach, we are also able to provide a point-based formula for the calmness modulus of the argmin mapping of linear programming problems without any uniqueness assumption on the optimal set. This formula still provides a lower bound in linear semi-infinite programming. Illustrative examples are given

Uniqueness of radial solutions for the fractional Laplacian

We prove general uniqueness results for radial solutions of linear and nonlinear equations involving the fractional Laplacian $(-\Delta)^s$ with $s \in (0,1)$ for any space dimensions $N \geq 1$. By extending a monotonicity formula found by Cabre and Sire \cite{CaSi-10}, we show that the linear equation $(-\Delta)^s u+ Vu = 0$ in $\mathbb{R}^N$ has at most one radial and bounded solution vanishing at infinity, provided that the potential $V$ is a radial and non-decreasing. In particular, this result implies that all radial eigenvalues of the corresponding fractional Schr\"odinger operator $H=(-\Delta)^s + V$ are simple. Furthermore, by combining these findings on linear equations with topological bounds for a related problem on the upper half-space $\mathbb{R}^{N+1}_+$, we show uniqueness and nondegeneracy of ground state solutions for the nonlinear equation $(-\Delta)^s Q + Q - |Q|^{\alpha} Q = 0$ in $\mathbb{R}^N$ for arbitrary space dimensions $N \geq 1$ and all admissible exponents $\alpha >0$. This generalizes the nondegeneracy and uniqueness result for dimension N=1 recently obtained by the first two authors in \cite{FrLe-10} and, in particular, the uniqueness result for solitary waves of the Benjamin--Ono equation found by Amick and Toland \cite{AmTo-91}.Comment: 38 pages; revised version; various typos corrected; proof of Lemma 8.1 corrected; discussion of case \kappa_* =1 in the proof of Theorem 2 corrected with new Lemma A.2; accepted for publication in Comm. Pure. Appl. Mat

The porous medium equation on Riemannian manifolds with negative curvature: the superquadratic case

We study the long-time behaviour of nonnegative solutions of the Porous Medium Equation posed on Cartan-Hadamard manifolds having very large negative curvature, more precisely when the sectional or Ricci curvatures diverge at infinity more than quadratically in terms of the geodesic distance to the pole. We find an unexpected separate-variable behaviour that reminds one of Dirichlet problems on bounded Euclidean domains. As a crucial step, we prove existence of solutions to a related sublinear elliptic problem, a result of independent interest. Uniqueness of solutions vanishing at infinity is also shown, along with comparison principles, both in the parabolic and in the elliptic case. Our results complete previous analyses of the Porous Medium Equation flow on negatively curved Riemannian manifolds, which were carried out first for the hyperbolic space and then for general Cartan-Hadamard manifolds with a negative curvature having at most quadratic growth. We point out that no similar analysis seems to exist for the linear heat flow. We also translate such results into some weighted Porous Medium Equations in the Euclidean space having special weights.Comment: Slight change in the title. Final version, to appear on Math. An

Representation Learning for Clustering: A Statistical Framework

We address the problem of communicating domain knowledge from a user to the designer of a clustering algorithm. We propose a protocol in which the user provides a clustering of a relatively small random sample of a data set. The algorithm designer then uses that sample to come up with a data representation under which $k$-means clustering results in a clustering (of the full data set) that is aligned with the user's clustering. We provide a formal statistical model for analyzing the sample complexity of learning a clustering representation with this paradigm. We then introduce a notion of capacity of a class of possible representations, in the spirit of the VC-dimension, showing that classes of representations that have finite such dimension can be successfully learned with sample size error bounds, and end our discussion with an analysis of that dimension for classes of representations induced by linear embeddings.Comment: To be published in Proceedings of UAI 201

Uniqueness and Nondegeneracy of Ground States for (−Δ)sQ+Q−Qα+1=0(-\Delta)^s Q + Q - Q^{\alpha+1} = 0 in R\mathbb{R}

We prove uniqueness of ground state solutions $Q = Q(|x|) \geq 0$ for the nonlinear equation $(-\Delta)^s Q + Q - Q^{\alpha+1}= 0$ in $\mathbb{R}$, where $0 < s < 1$ and $0 < \alpha < \frac{4s}{1-2s}$ for $s < 1/2$ and $0 < \alpha < \infty$ for $s \geq 1/2$. Here $(-\Delta)^s$ denotes the fractional Laplacian in one dimension. In particular, we generalize (by completely different techniques) the specific uniqueness result obtained by Amick and Toland for $s=1/2$ and $\alpha=1$ in [Acta Math., \textbf{167} (1991), 107--126]. As a technical key result in this paper, we show that the associated linearized operator $L_+ = (-\Delta)^s + 1 - (\alpha+1) Q^\alpha$ is nondegenerate; i.\,e., its kernel satisfies $\mathrm{ker}\, L_+ = \mathrm{span}\, \{Q'\}$. This result about $L_+$ proves a spectral assumption, which plays a central role for the stability of solitary waves and blowup analysis for nonlinear dispersive PDEs with fractional Laplacians, such as the generalized Benjamin-Ono (BO) and Benjamin-Bona-Mahony (BBM) water wave equations.Comment: 45 page