The Nagata Conjecture governs the minimal degree required for a plane algebraic curve to pass through a collection of $r$ general points in the projective plane $P^2$ with prescribed multiplicities. The "SHGH" Conjecture governs the dimension of the linear space of these polynomials. We formulate transcendental versions of these conjectures in term of pluripotential theory and we're making some progress.

For $d\ge 2$ and an odd prime power $q$, let $\mathbb{F}_q^d$ be the $d$-dimensional vector space over the finite field $\mathbb{F}_q$. The distance between two points $(x_1,\ldots,x_d)$ and $(y_1,\ldots,y_d)$ is defined to be $\sum_{i=1}^d (x_i-y_i)^2$. An influential result of Iosevich and Rudnev is: if $E \subset \mathbb{F}_q^d$ is sufficiently large and $t \in \mathbb{F}_q$, then there are a pair of points $x,y \in E$ such that the distance between $x$ and $y$ is $t$. Subsequent works considered embedding graphs of distances, rather than a single distance. I will discuss joint work with Debsoumya Chakraborti, in which we show that every sufficiently large subset of $\mathbb{F}_q^d$ contains every nearly spanning tree of distances with bounded degree in each distance. The main novelty in this result is that the distance graphs we find are nearly as large as the set $S$ itself, but even for smaller distance trees our work leads to quantitative improvements to previously known bounds. A key ingredient in our proof is a new colorful generalization of a classical result of Haxell on finding nearly spanning bounded-degree trees in expander graphs. This is joint work with Debsoumya Chakraborti.

TBD

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ZOOM ID: 997 8258 4700 (Biomedical Mathematics Online Colloquium), (pw: 1234) + Google Map

Given a set of lines in $\mathbb R^d$, a joint is a point contained in d linearly independent lines. Guth and Katz showed that N lines can determine at most $O(N^{3/2})$ joints in $\mathbb R^3$ via the polynomial method. Yu and I proved a tight bound on this problem, which also solves a conjecture proposed by Bollobás and Eccles on the partial shadow problem. It is surprising to us that the only known proof of this purely extremal graph theoretic problem uses incidence geometry and the polynomial method.

The Dedekind's Problem asks the number of monotone Boolean functions, a(n), on n variables. Equivalently, a(n) is the number of antichains in the n-dimensional Boolean lattice $[2]^n$. While the exact formula for the Dedekind number a(n) is still unknown, its asymptotic formula has been well-studied. Since any subsets of a middle layer of the Boolean lattice is an antichain, the logarithm of a(n) is trivially bounded below by the size of the middle layer. In the 1960's, Kleitman proved that this trivial lower bound is optimal in the logarithmic scale, and the actual asymptotics was also proved by Korshunov in 1980’s. In this talk, we will discuss recent developments on some variants of Dedekind's Problem. Based on joint works with Matthew Jenssen, Alex Malekshahian, Michail Sarantis, and Prasad Tetali.

For any finite point set $P \subset \mathbb{R}^d$, we denote by $\text{diam}(P)$ the ratio of the largest to the smallest distances between pairs of points in $P$. Let $c_{d, \alpha}(n)$ be the largest integer $c$ such that any $n$-point set $P \subset \mathbb{R}^d$ in general position, satisfying $\text{diam}(P) < \alpha\sqrt[d]{n}$ (informally speaking, `non-elongated'), contains a convex $c$-polytope. Valtr proved that $c_{2, \alpha}(n) \approx \sqrt[3]{n}$, which is asymptotically tight in the plane. We generalize the results by establishing $c_{d, \alpha}(n) \approx n^{\frac{d-1}{d+1}}$. Along the way we generalize the definitions and analysis of convex cups and caps to higher dimensions, which may be of independent interest. Joint work with Boris Bukh.