Leonie Kayser

We show that the polar degrees of the coordinate-wise inverse of a linear subspace L⊆ℙ^n are given by the coefficients of a substitution of the reduced characteristic polynomial of the associated matroid M(L). Our proof connects the geometry of conormal varieties of reciprocal linear spaces to the combinatorial conormal fan of M(L). As a corollary, we settle two open conjectures regarding matroid discriminants.

The computational complexity of polynomial ideals and Gröbner bases has been studied since the 1980s. In recent years the related notions of polynomial subalgebras and SAGBI bases have gained more and more attention in computational algebra, with a view towards effective algorithms. We investigate the computational complexity of the subalgebra membership problem and degree bounds. In particular, we place these problems in the complexity class EXPSPACE and prove PSPACE-completeness for homogeneous algebras. We highlight parallels and differences compared to the settings of ideals and also look at important classes of polynomials such as monomial algebras.

In June 2024 the Queer in Math Day was held at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig. We, the authors and organizers, would like to give a brief, informal introduction to the surrounding topics, what led up to this day, and some food for thought for everyone in the mathematical community.

A recurring task in particle physics and statistics is to compute the complex critical points of a product of powers of affine-linear functions. The logarithmic discriminant characterizes exponents for which such a function has a degenerate critical point in the corresponding hyperplane arrangement complement. We study properties of this discriminant, exploiting its connection with the Hurwitz form of a reciprocal linear space.

A set of 2n points in ℙ^n-1 is self-dual if it is invariant under the Gale transform. Motivated by Mukai’s work on canonical curves, Petrakiev showed that a general self-dual set of 14 points in ℙ⁶ arises as the intersection of the Grassmannian Gr(2,6) in its Plücker embedding in ℙ¹⁴ with a linear space of dimension 6. In this paper we focus on the inverse problem of recovering such a linear space associated to a general self-dual set of points. We use numerical homotopy continuation to approach the problem and implement an algorithm in Julia to solve it. Along the way we also implement the forward problem of slicing Grassmannians and use it to experimentally study the real solutions to this problem.

A chopped ideal is obtained from a homogeneous ideal by considering only the generators of a fixed degree. We investigate cases in which the chopped ideal defines the same finite set of points as the original one-dimensional ideal. The complexity of computing these points from the chopped ideal is governed by the Hilbert function and regularity. We conjecture values for these invariants and prove them in many cases. We show that our conjecture is of practical relevance for symmetric tensor decomposition.