40 research outputs found
Configurations of lines and models of Lie algebras
The automorphism groups of the 27 lines on the smooth cubic surface or the 28
bitangents to the general quartic plane curve are well-known to be closely
related to the Weyl groups of and . We show how classical
subconfigurations of lines, such as double-sixes, triple systems or Steiner
sets, are easily constructed from certain models of the exceptional Lie
algebras. For and we are lead to
beautiful models graded over the octonions, which display these algebras as
plane projective geometries of subalgebras. We also interpret the group of the
bitangents as a group of transformations of the triangles in the Fano plane,
and show how this allows to realize the isomorphism in terms of harmonic cubes.Comment: 31 page
Quartic Curves and Their Bitangents
A smooth quartic curve in the complex projective plane has 36 inequivalent
representations as a symmetric determinant of linear forms and 63
representations as a sum of three squares. These correspond to Cayley octads
and Steiner complexes respectively. We present exact algorithms for computing
these objects from the 28 bitangents. This expresses Vinnikov quartics as
spectrahedra and positive quartics as Gram matrices. We explore the geometry of
Gram spectrahedra and we find equations for the variety of Cayley octads.
Interwoven is an exposition of much of the 19th century theory of plane
quartics.Comment: 26 pages, 3 figures, added references, fixed theorems 4.3 and 7.8,
other minor change
Maximally inflected real rational curves
We introduce and begin the topological study of real rational plane curves,
all of whose inflection points are real. The existence of such curves is a
corollary of results in the real Schubert calculus, and their study has
consequences for the important Shapiro and Shapiro conjecture in the real
Schubert calculus. We establish restrictions on the number of real nodes of
such curves and construct curves realizing the extreme numbers of real nodes.
These constructions imply the existence of real solutions to some problems in
the Schubert calculus. We conclude with a discussion of maximally inflected
curves of low degree.Comment: Revised with minor corrections. 37 pages with 106 .eps figures. Over
250 additional pictures on accompanying web page (See
http://www.math.umass.edu/~sottile/pages/inflected/index.html
On the containment problem
The purpose of this note is to provide an overview of the containment problem
for symbolic and ordinary powers of homogeneous ideals, related conjectures and
examples. We focus here on ideals with zero dimensional support. This is an
area of ongoing active research. We conclude the note with a list of potential
promising paths of further research.Comment: 13 pages, 1 figur
LR characterization of chirotopes of finite planar families of pairwise disjoint convex bodies
We extend the classical LR characterization of chirotopes of finite planar
families of points to chirotopes of finite planar families of pairwise disjoint
convex bodies: a map \c{hi} on the set of 3-subsets of a finite set I is a
chirotope of finite planar families of pairwise disjoint convex bodies if and
only if for every 3-, 4-, and 5-subset J of I the restriction of \c{hi} to the
set of 3-subsets of J is a chirotope of finite planar families of pairwise
disjoint convex bodies. Our main tool is the polarity map, i.e., the map that
assigns to a convex body the set of lines missing its interior, from which we
derive the key notion of arrangements of double pseudolines, introduced for the
first time in this paper.Comment: 100 pages, 73 figures; accepted manuscript versio
Algebraic Methods for Dynamical Systems and Optimisation
This thesis develops various aspects of Algebraic Geometry and its applications in different fields of science.
In Chapter 2 we characterise the feasible set of an optimisation problem relevant in chemical process engineering. We consider the polynomial dynamical system associated with mass-action kinetics of a chemical reaction network. Given an initial point, the attainable region of that point is the smallest convex and forward closed set that contains the trajectory. We show that this region is a spectrahedral shadow for a class of linear dynamical systems. As a step towards representing attainable regions we develop algorithms to compute the convex hulls of trajectories. We present an implementation of this algorithm which works in dimensions 2,3 and 4. These algorithms are based on a theory that approximates the boundary of the convex hull of curves by a family of polytopes. If the convex hull is represented as the output of our algorithms we can also check whether it is forward closed or not.
Chapter 3 has two parts. In this first part, we do a case study of planar curves of degree 6. It is known that there are 64 rigid isotopy types of these curves. We construct explicit polynomial representatives with integer coefficients for each of these types using different techniques in the literature. We present an algorithm, and its implementation in software Mathematica, for determining the isotopy type of a given sextic. Using the representatives various sextics for each type were sampled. On those samples we explored the number of real bitangents, inflection points and eigenvectors. We also computed the tensor rank of the representatives by numerical methods. We show that the locus of all real lines that do not meet a given sextic is a union of up to 46 convex regions that is bounded by its dual curve.
In the second part of Chapter 3 we consider a problem arising in molecular biology. In a system where molecules bind to a target molecule with multiple binding sites, cooperativity measures how the already bound molecules affect the chances of other molecules binding. We address an optimisation problem that arises while quantifying cooperativity. We compute cooperativity for the real data of molecules binding to hemoglobin and its variants.
In Chapter 4, given a variety X in n-dimensional projective space we look at its image under the map that takes each point in X to its coordinate-wise r-th power. We compute the degree of the image. We also study their defining equations, particularly for hypersurfaces and linear spaces. We exhibit the set-theoretic equations of the coordinate-wise square of a linear space L of dimension k embedded in a high dimensional ambient space. We also establish a link between coordinate-wise squares of linear spaces and the study of real symmetric matrices with degenerate eigenspectrum
Two-cover descent on plane quartics with rational bitangents
We implement two-cover descent for plane quartics over Q with all 28
bitangents rational and show that on a significant collection of test cases, it
resolves the existence of rational points. We also review a classical
description of the relevant moduli space and use it to generate examples. We
observe that local obstructions are quite rare for such curves, and only seem
to occur in practice at primes of good reduction. In particular, having good
reduction at 11 implies having no rational points. We also gather numerical
data on two-Selmer ranks of Jacobians of these curves, which suggests that
these often have non-trivial Tate-Shafarevich groups.
We implement two-cover descent for plane quartics over Q with all 28
bitangents rational and show that on a significant collection of test cases, it
resolves the existence of rational points. We also review a classical
description of the relevant moduli space and use it to generate examples. We
observe that local obstructions are quite rare for such curves and only seem to
occur in practice at primes of good reduction. In particular, having good
reduction at 11 implies having no rational points. We also gather numerical
data on two-Selmer ranks of Jacobians of these curves, providing evidence these
behave differently from those of general abelian varieties due to the frequent
presence of an everywhere locally trivial torsor.Comment: 15 pages; Some minor improvements to algorithm and rank data analysi
Klein's arrangements of lines and conics
In this paper we construct several arrangements of lines and/or conics that
are derived from the geometry of the Klein arrangement of lines in the
complex projective plane.Comment: 19 pages, 11 figure