We prove that three spaces of importance in topological combinatorics are homeomorphic to closed balls: the totally nonnegative Grassmannian, the compactification of the space of electrical networks, and the cyclically symmetric amplituhedron.
Marsh and Rietsch defined and studied a superpotential on the Grassmannian in the context of mirror symmetry [Section 6] marsh_rietsch . It follows from results of Rietsch @cite_2 (as explained in @cite_24 ) that @math is, rather surprisingly, also the unique totally nonnegative critical point of the @math specialization of the superpotential. However, the superpotential is not defined on the boundary of @math . The precise relationship between @math and the gradient flow of the superpotential remains mysterious.
@cite_24 @cite_2
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We show that for each k and n, the cyclic shift map on the complex Grassmannian Gr(k,n) has exactly @math fixed points. There is a unique totally nonnegative fixed point, given by taking n equally spaced points on the trigonometric moment curve (if k is odd) or the symmetric moment curve (if k is even). We introduce a parameter q, and show that the fixed points of a q-deformation of the cyclic shift map are precisely the critical points of the mirror-symmetric superpotential @math on Gr(k,n). This follows from results of Rietsch about the quantum cohomology ring of Gr(k,n). We survey many other diverse contexts which feature moment curves and the cyclic shift map. We study the maximum of a Gaussian field on @math ( @math ) whose correlations decay logarithmically with the distance. Kahane Kah85 introduced this model to construct mathematically the Gaussian multiplicative chaos in the subcritical case. Duplantier, Rhodes, Sheffield and Vargas DRSV12a DRSV12b extended Kahane's construction to the critical case and established the KPZ formula at criticality. Moreover, they made in DRSV12a several conjectures on the supercritical case and on the maximum of this Gaussian field. In this paper we resolve Conjecture 12 in DRSV12a : we establish the convergence in law of the maximum and show that the limit law is the Gumbel distribution convoluted by the limit of the derivative martingale. The goal of this paper is to propose a theory of mirror symmetry for varieties of general type. Using Landau-Ginzburg mirrors as motivation, we describe the mirror of a hypersurface of general type (and more generally varieties of non-negative Kodaira dimension) as the critical locus of the zero fibre of a certain Landau-Ginzburg potential. The critical locus carries a perverse sheaf of vanishing cycles. Our main results shows that one obtains the interchange of Hodge numbers expected in mirror symmetry. This exchange is between the Hodge numbers of the hypersurface and certain Hodge numbers defined using a mixed Hodge structure on the hypercohomology of the perverse sheaf. This exchange can be anticipated from an analysis of Hochschild homology of the relevant categories arising in homological mirror symmetry in this case; we also conjecture that a similar, but different, exchange of dimensions arises from Hochschild cohomology, relating the cohomology of sheaves of polyvector fields on the hypersurface to the cohomology of the critical locus. We consider the problem of computing critical points of the restriction of a polynomial map to an algebraic variety. This is of first importance since the global minimum of such a map is reached at a critical point. Thus, these points appear naturally in non-convex polynomial optimization which occurs in a wide range of scientific applications (control theory, chemistry, economics,...). Critical points also play a central role in recent algorithms of effective real algebraic geometry. Experimentally, it has been observed that Gr "obner basis algorithms are efficient to compute such points. Therefore, recent software based on the so-called Critical Point Method are built on Gr "obner bases engines. Let @math be polynomials in @math of degree @math , @math be their complex variety and @math be the projection map @math . The critical points of the restriction of @math to @math are defined by the vanishing of @math and some maximal minors of the Jacobian matrix associated to @math . Such a system is algebraically structured: the ideal it generates is the sum of a determinantal ideal and the ideal generated by @math . We provide the first complexity estimates on the computation of Gr "obner bases of such systems defining critical points. We prove that under genericity assumptions on @math , the complexity is polynomial in the generic number of critical points, i.e. @math . More particularly, in the quadratic case D=2, the complexity of such a Gr "obner basis computation is polynomial in the number of variables @math and exponential in @math . We also give experimental evidence supporting these theoretical results.