Legendrian contact homology and nondestabilizability

We provide the first example of a Legendrian knot with nonvanishing contact homology whose Thurston-Bennequin invariant is not maximal.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figure

Higher-dimensional linking integrals

We derive an integral formula for the linking number of two submanifolds of the n-sphere S^n, of the product S^n x R^m, and of other manifolds which appear as "nice" hypersurfaces in Euclidean space. The formulas are geometrically meaningful in that they are invariant under the action of the special orthogonal group on the ambient space.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure

A Fast Direct Sampling Algorithm for Equilateral Closed Polygons

Sampling equilateral closed polygons is of interest in the statistical study of ring polymers. Over the past 30 years, previous authors have proposed a variety of simple Markov chain algorithms (but have not been able to show that they converge to the correct probability distribution) and complicated direct samplers (which require extended-precision arithmetic to evaluate numerically unstable polynomials). We present a simple direct sampler which is fast and numerically stable, and analyze its runtime using a new formula for the volume of equilateral polygon space as a Dirichlet-type integral.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures. Added Duplantier as coauthor; we now give the precise asymptotic complexity of the algorith

Fusion Frame Homotopy and Tightening Fusion Frames by Gradient Descent

Finite frames, or spanning sets for finite-dimensional Hilbert spaces, are a ubiquitous tool in signal processing. There has been much recent work on understanding the global structure of collections of finite frames with prescribed properties, such as spaces of unit norm tight frames. We extend some of these results to the more general setting of fusion frames -- a fusion frame is a collection of subspaces of a finite-dimensional Hilbert space with the property that any vector can be recovered from its list of projections. The notion of tightness extends to fusion frames, and we consider the following basic question: is the collection of tight fusion frames with prescribed subspace dimensions path connected? We answer (a generalization of) this question in the affirmative, extending the analogous result for unit norm tight frames proved by Cahill, Mixon and Strawn. We also extend a result of Benedetto and Fickus, who defined a natural functional on the space of unit norm frames (the frame potential), showed that its global minimizers are tight, and showed that it has no spurious local minimizers, meaning that gradient descent can be used to construct unit-norm tight frames. We prove the analogous result for the fusion frame potential of Casazza and Fickus, implying that, when tight fusion frames exist for a given choice of dimensions, they can be constructed via gradient descent. Our proofs use techniques from symplectic geometry and Mumford's geometric invariant theory