No Arabic abstract
We present a necessary and sufficient condition for a cubic polynomial to be positive for all positive reals. We identify the set where the cubic polynomial is nonnegative but not all positive for all positive reals, and explicitly give the points where the cubic polynomial attains zero. We then reformulate a necessary and sufficient condition for a quartic polynomial to be nonnegative for all positive reals. From this, we derive a necessary and sufficient condition for a quartic polynomial to be nonnegative and positive for all reals. Our condition explicitly exhibits the scope and role of some coefficients, and has strong geometrical meaning. In the interior of the nonnegativity region for all reals, there is an appendix curve. The discriminant is zero at the appendix, and positive in the other part of the interior of the nonnegativity region. By using the Sturm sequences, we present a necessary and sufficient condition for a quintic polynomial to be positive and nonnegative for all positive reals. We show that for polynomials of a fixed even degree higher than or equal to four, if they have no real roots, then their discriminants take the same sign, which depends upon that degree only, except on an appendix set of dimension lower by two, where the discriminants attain zero.
A classical result by Schoenberg (1942) identifies all real-valued functions that preserve positive semidefiniteness (psd) when applied entrywise to matrices of arbitrary dimension. Schoenbergs work has continued to attract significant interest, including renewed recent attention due to applications in high-dimensional statistics. However, despite a great deal of effort in the area, an effective characterization of entrywise functions preserving positivity in a fixed dimension remains elusive to date. As a first step, we characterize new classes of polynomials preserving positivity in fixed dimension. The proof of our main result is representation theoretic, and employs Schur polynomials. An alternate, variational approach also leads to several interesting consequences including (a) a hitherto unexplored Schubert cell-type stratification of the cone of psd matrices, (b) new connections between generalized Rayleigh quotients of Hadamard powers and Schur polynomials, and (c) a description of the joint kernels of Hadamard powers.
The object of this paper is to give a systematic treatment of excedance-type polynomials. We first give a sufficient condition for a sequence of polynomials to have alternatingly increasing property, and then we present a systematic study of the joint distribution of excedances, fixed points and cycles of permutations and derangements, signed or not, colored or not. Let $pin [0,1]$ and $qin [0,1]$ be two given real numbers. We prove that the cyc q-Eulerian polynomials of permutations are bi-gamma-positive, and the fix and cyc (p,q)-Eulerian polynomials of permutations are alternatingly increasing, and so they are unimodal with modes in the middle, where fix and cyc are the fixed point and cycle statistics. When p=1 and q=1/2, we find a combinatorial interpretation of the bi-gamma-coefficients of the (p,q)-Eulerian polynomials. We then study excedance and flag excedance statistics of signed permutations and colored permutations. In particular, we establish the relationships between the (p,q)-Eulerian polynomials and some multivariate Eulerian polynomials. Our results unify and generalize a variety of recent results.
We give a cohomological interpretation of both the Kac polynomial and the refined Donaldson-Thomas- invariants of quivers. This interpretation yields a proof of a conjecture of Kac from 1982 and gives a new perspective on recent work of Kontsevich-Soibelman. This is achieved by computing, via an arithmetic Fourier transform, the dimensions of the isoytpical components of the cohomology of associated Nakajima quiver varieties under the action of a Weyl group. The generating function of the corresponding Poincare polynomials is an extension of Huas formula for Kac polynomials of quivers involving Hall-Littlewood symmetric functions. The resulting formulae contain a wide range of information on the geometry of the quiver varieties.
The alternating descent statistic on permutations was introduced by Chebikin as a variant of the descent statistic. We show that the alternating descent polynomials on permutations are unimodal via a five-term recurrence relation. We also found a quadratic recursion for the alternating major index $q$-analog of the alternating descent polynomials. As an interesting application of this quadratic recursion, we show that $(1+q)^{lfloor n/2rfloor}$ divides $sum_{piinmathfrak{S}_n}q^{rm{altmaj}(pi)}$, where $mathfrak{S}_n$ is the set of all permutations of ${1,2,ldots,n}$ and $rm{altmaj}(pi)$ is the alternating major index of $pi$. This leads us to discover a $q$-analog of $n!=2^{ell}m$, $m$ odd, using the statistic of alternating major index. Moreover, we study the $gamma$-vectors of the alternating descent polynomials by using these two recursions and the ${textbf{cd}}$-index. Further intriguing conjectures are formulated, which indicate that the alternating descent statistic deserves more work.
We prove a positivity result for interpolation polynomials that was conjectured by Knop and Sahi. These polynomials were first introduced by Sahi in the context of the Capelli eigenvalue problem for Jordan algebras, and were later shown to be related to Jack polynomials by Knop-Sahi and Okounkov-Olshanski. The positivity result proved here is an inhomogeneous generalization of Macdonalds positivity conjecture for Jack polynomials. We also formulate and prove the non-symmetric version of the Knop-Sahi conjecture, and in fact we deduce everything from an even stronger positivity result. This last result concerns certain inhomogeneous analogues of ordinary monomials that we call bar monomials. Their positivity involves in an essential way a new partial order on compositions that we call the bar order, and a new operation that we call a glissade.