Putting the "volume" back in volume polynomials

Abstract: It is a strange and wonderful fact that Chow rings of matroids behave in many ways similarly to Chow rings of smooth projective varieties. Because of this, the Chow ring of a matroid is determined by a homogeneous polynomial called its volume polynomial, whose coefficients record the degrees of all possible top products of divisors. The use of the word "volume" is motivated by the fact that the volume polynomial of a smooth projective toric variety actually measures the volumes of certain polytopes associated to the variety. In the matroid setting, on the other hand, no such polytopes exist, and the goal of our work was to find more general polyhedral objects whose volume is measured by the volume polynomial of matroids. In this talk, I will motivate and describe these polyhedral objects. This is joint work with Anastasia Nathanson.

algebraic geometry

Audience: researchers in the topic

UBC Vancouver Algebraic Geometry Seminar

Series comments: Recordings and slides are available on the seminar webpage:

wiki.math.ubc.ca/mathbook/alggeom-seminar/Main_Page