The invariants of the binary decimic

We consider the algebra of invariants of binary forms of degree 10 with complex coefficients, construct a system of parameters with degrees 2, 4, 6, 6, 8, 9, 10, 14 and find the 106 basic invariants

The invariants of the binary nonic

We consider the algebra of invariants of binary forms of degree 9 with complex coefficients, find the 92 basic invariants, give an explicit system of parameters and show the existence of four more systems of parameters with different sets of degrees

The Elementary Divisors of the Incidence Matrix of Skew Lines in PG(3,q)

The elementary divisors of the incidence matrix of lines in PG(3,q) are computed, where two lines are incident if and only if they are skew.Comment: 13 pages. The results of this paper supersede those in the paper arXiv:math/1001.2551 V2. Minor correction

Tight bounds for break minimization

We consider round-robin sports tournaments with n teams and n − 1 rounds. We construct an infinite family of opponent schedules for which every home-away assignment induces at least 1/4 n(n−2) breaks. This construction establishes a matching lower bound for a corresponding upper bound from the literature

Lossy gossip and composition of metrics

We study the monoid generated by n-by-n distance matrices under tropical (or min-plus) multiplication. Using the tropical geometry of the orthogonal group, we prove that this monoid is a finite polyhedral fan of dimension n(n-1)/2, and we compute the structure of this fan for n up to 5. The monoid captures gossip among n gossipers over lossy phone lines, and contains the gossip monoid over ordinary phone lines as a submonoid. We prove several new results about this submonoid, as well. In particular, we establish a sharp bound on chains of calls in each of which someone learns something new.Comment: Minor textual edits, final versio

Two distance-regular graphs

We construct two families of distance-regular graphs, namely the subgraph of the dual polar graph of type B_3(q) induced on the vertices far from a fixed point, and the subgraph of the dual polar graph of type D_4(q) induced on the vertices far from a fixed edge. The latter is the extended bipartite double of the former

SL2-modules of small homological dimension

Let Vn be the SL2-module of binary forms of degree n and let V = Vn1+...+Vnp . We consider the algebra R of polynomial functions on V invariant under the action of SL2. The measure of the intricacy of these algebras is the length of their chains of syzygies, called homological dimension hdR. Popov gave in 1983 a classification of the cases in which hdR <=10 for a single binary form (p = 1) or hdR 1). We extend Popov's result and determine for p = 1 the cases with hdR 1 those with hdR <= 15. In these cases we give a set of homogeneous parameters and a set of generators for the algebra R

Notes on simplicial rook graphs

The simplicial rook graph ${\rm SR}(m,n)$ is the graph of which the vertices are the sequences of nonnegative integers of length $m$ summing to $n$, where two such sequences are adjacent when they differ in precisely two places. We show that ${\rm SR}(m,n)$ has integral eigenvalues, and smallest eigenvalue $s = \max (-n, -{m \choose 2})$, and that this graph has a large part of its spectrum in common with the Johnson graph $J(m+n-1,n)$. We determine the automorphism group and several other properties