Airy, Beltrami, Maxwell, Morera, Einstein and Lanczos potentials revisited

The main purpose of this paper is to revisit the well known potentials, called stress functions, needed in order to study the parametrizations of the stress equations, respectively provided by G.B. Airy (1863) for 2-dimensional elasticity, then by E. Beltrami (1892), J.C. Maxwell (1870) and G. Morera (1892) for 3-dimensional elasticity, finally by A. Einstein (1915) for 4-dimensional elasticity, both with a variational procedure introduced by C. Lanczos (1949,1962) in order to relate potentials to Lagrange multipliers. Using the methods of Algebraic Analysis, namely mixing differential geometry with homological algebra and combining the double duality test involved with the Spencer cohomology, we shall be able to extend these results to an arbitrary situation with an arbitrary dimension n. We shall also explain why double duality is perfectly adapted to variational calculus with differential constraints as a way to eliminate the corresponding Lagrange multipliers. For example, the canonical parametrization of the stress equations is just described by the formal adjoint of the n2(n2 -- 1)/12 components of the linearized Riemann tensor considered as a linear second order differential operator but the minimum number of potentials needed in elasticity theory is equal to n(n -- 1)/2 for any minimal parametrization. Meanwhile, we can provide all the above results without even using indices for writing down explicit formulas in the way it is done in any textbook today. The example of relativistic continuum mechanics with n = 4 is provided in order to prove that it could be strictly impossible to obtain such results without using the above methods. We also revisit the possibility (Maxwell equations of electromag- netism) or the impossibility (Einstein equations of gravitation) to obtain canonical or minimal parametrizations for various other equations of physics. It is nevertheless important to notice that, when n and the algorithms presented are known, most of the calculations can be achieved by using computers for the corresponding symbolic computations. Finally, though the paper is mathematically oriented as it aims providing new insights towards the mathematical foundations of elasticity theory and mathematical physics, it is written in a rather self-contained way

Spacetime deployments parametrized by gravitational and electromagnetic fields

On the basis of a "Punctual" Equivalence Principle of the general relativity context, we consider spacetimes with measurements of conformally invariant physical properties. Then, applying the Pfaff theory for PDE to a particular conformally equivariant system of differential equations, we make explicit the dependence of any kind of function describing a "spacetime deployment", on n(n+1) parametrizing functions, denoting by n the spacetime dimension. These functions, appearing in a linear differential Spencer sequence and determining gauge fields of spacetime deformations relatively to a "substrat spacetime", can be consistently ascribed to unified electromagnetic and gravitational fields, at any spacetime dimensions n greater or equal to 4.Comment: 26 pages, LaTeX2e, file macro "suppl.sty", correction in the definition of germs and local ring

A hierarchy of parametrizing varieties for representations

The primary purpose is to introduce and explore projective varieties, $\text{GRASS}_{\bf d}(\Lambda)$, parametrizing the full collection of those modules over a finite dimensional algebra $\Lambda$ which have dimension vector $\bf d$. These varieties extend the smaller varieties previously studied by the author; namely, the projective varieties encoding those modules with dimension vector $\bf d$ which, in addition, have a preassigned top or radical layering. Each of the $\text{GRASS}_{\bf d}(\Lambda)$ is again partitioned by the action of a linear algebraic group, and covered by certain representation-theoretically defined affine subvarieties which are stable under the unipotent radical of the acting group. A special case of the pertinent theorem served as a cornerstone in the work on generic representations by Babson, Thomas, and the author. Moreover, applications are given to the study of degenerations

"Not not bad" is not "bad": A distributional account of negation

With the increasing empirical success of distributional models of compositional semantics, it is timely to consider the types of textual logic that such models are capable of capturing. In this paper, we address shortcomings in the ability of current models to capture logical operations such as negation. As a solution we propose a tripartite formulation for a continuous vector space representation of semantics and subsequently use this representation to develop a formal compositional notion of negation within such models.Comment: 9 pages, to appear in Proceedings of the 2013 Workshop on Continuous Vector Space Models and their Compositionalit