KOALA 2024:  Workshop of the Kentucky-Ohio ALgebra Alliance

May 21-22, 2024
Math Department
University of Kentucky

Organizers:
Dave Jensen
Chris Manon

This event is funded by the National Science Foundation
under
DMS-2054135 and DMS-2101911.
KOALA Poster


Registration:
All participants, including invited speakers, are asked to register online.  The deadline for registration is April 30.  Please fill out the following registration form.

Discord Server:
The KOALA discord can be found here: 
https://discord.gg/N7bKwTPTDn

About KOALA:

The Mathematics Departments at both The Ohio State University (Columbus, OH) and the University of Kentucky (Lexington, KY) have a critical mass of faculty, postdocs and graduate students in Combinatorial Algebraic Geometry. Faculty at both institutions often have research collaborations and meet each other at conferences. Younger members of both groups do not have as many opportunities to interact.

KOALA workshops (regular 2-day meetings held once a year, and alternating between both institutions) provide a venue to further expand collaborations between these two groups. Their main goals are:



Speakers:

Austin Alderete

Madeline Brandt
Austin Alderete

Madeline Brandt



Juliette Bruce
                            
Chris Eur
Juliette Bruce

Chris Eur



Schedule:


Time
Location
Speaker/Event
Title
Tuesday


1:00 - 1:50 PM
CP 103
Chris Eur
Matroids as Vector Bundles
2:00 - 3:00 PM
CP 111
Coffee Break

3:00 - 3:50 PM
CP 103
Juliette Bruce
The Top-Weight Cohomology of A_g
4:00 - 4:30 PM
CP 111
Coffee Break

4:30 - 5:30 PM
CP 103
Lightning Session

6:00 - 8:00 PM
Math House (654 Maxwelton Ct)
Dinner

8:00 PM - ???
Kentucky Native Cafe
Drinks





Wednesday



8:30 - 9:30 AM
CP 111
Breakfast

9:30 - 10:20 AM
CP 103
Austin Alderete
Toric Matroid Bundles
10:30 - 11:00 AM
CP 111
Coffee Break

11:00 - 11:50 AM
CP 103
Madeline Brandt
Topology of (Tropical) Moduli Spaces:  Hyperelliptic Curves
12:00 PM - ???
Wherever you like
Lunch




Titles and Abstracts:

Austin Alderete:  Toric Matroid Bundles

The Kaveh-Manon classification of torus-equivariant principal G-bundles in terms of piecewise-linear maps allows one to define a toric matroid bundle.  We discuss these new objects and their connection to the tautological classes of matroids, ending with an example of a toric matroid bundle over the projective line which does not split.

Madeline Brandt:
  Topology of (Tropical) Moduli Spaces: Hyperelliptic Curves

Moduli spaces offer a geometric solution to geometric classification problems by parameterizing all objects of some type. Tropical versions of these spaces explain the combinatorics of their compactifications.     Moreover, these tropical moduli spaces can be used to compute a piece of the cohomology of the corresponding classical moduli space. In joint work with Melody Chan and Siddarth Kannan, we study the topology of the moduli space of hyperelliptic curves using these techniques.

Juliette Bruce:  The Top-Weight Cohomology of A_g

I will discuss recent work calculating the top weight cohomology of the moduli space A_g of principally polarized abelian varieties of dimension g for small values of g. The key idea is that this piece of cohomology is encoded combinatorially via the relationship between the boundary complex of a compactification of A_g and the moduli space of tropical abelian varieties. This is joint work with Madeline Brandt, Melody Chan, Margarida Melo, Gwyneth Moreland, and Corey Wolfe.


Chris Eur:  Matroids as Vector Bundles

Matroids are combinatorial abstractions of linear subspaces in a coordinatized vector space.  Could these objects further be interpreted as some sort of a vector bundle?  If so, what good does it do?  We discuss some past results, developing ideas, and possible future directions.


5 Minute Talks:

Ishan Banerjee:  An Aysmptotic Lefschetz Theorem for Rational Fibrations

Let Y, Z be smooth
projective varieties.  Let e>0.  Let X be a degree d hypersurface in Y.  Let RatFib_{\le e}(Y,Z), Ratfib_{\le e}(X,Z) denote the set of dominant rational maps from Y to Z and X to Z of degree $\le e$ respectively.  Then for d sufficiently large, we prove that there is a restriction map from RatFib_{\le e}(Y,Z) to RatFib_{\le e}(X,Z) and that furthermore this map is a bijection.  I will comment briefly on some motivation for this result and about the proof.  This is joint work with David Stapleton.

Kyle Binder:  Higher Tor Groups for Matroids

For a loopless matroid, the Chow group is an important invariant which has been used to resolve log-concavity conjectures in matroid theory.  Geometrically, this group is the Chow group of the toric variety attached to the Bergman fan of the matroid.  In this talk, I will mention how to generalize the Chow group of matroids via higher Tor groups, their relation to the cohomology groups of toric varieties, and the case of uniform matroids.

Eric Burkholder:  Searching for a Tropical Basepoint Free Pencil Trick

Classically, the Basepoint Free Pencil Trick provides a lower bound on the number of linearly independent functions in the product of two linear series, in which one of the linear series is rank 1 and basepoint free.  To pursue a tropicalized version of this result, we will define a notion of tropical independence of functions and provide our most recent result for tropical linear series on the metric graph of a loop.

Hugh Dennin:  Cauchy Identities for Schubert Polynomials via Pipe Dreams

Schubert polynomials are a family of polynomials indexed by partitions which represent Schubert cycles in the cohomology of the complete flag variety.  They can be interpreted
combinatorially as the generating series of a class of diagrams called pipe dreams.  We introduce a new "push" bijection on pipe dreams which gives a new proof of certain Cauchy identities relating Schubert polynomials to double Schubert polynomials.

Casey Hill:  The Algebra of SL_4 Conformal Blocks

Conformal blocks are objects from mathematical physics which appear naturally as the spaces of global sections of line bundles on the moduli of vector bundles on smooth curves.  In this talk, we will discuss how to determine a presentation for the algebra of SL_4 conformal blocks.

William Newman:  Moduli Spaces and Higher Chow Groups

In this talk, I will explain how to use higher groups and the localization exact sequence to compute Chow groups of moduli spaces.

Jordan Sawdy:  A Bicategorical Grothendieck-Riemann-Roch

In 2020, Hoyois, Safronov, Scherotzke, and Sibilla established a GRR-type theorem in the context of symmetric monoidal infinity-categories.  I'll discuss some work I've been doing on a similar result, but in the context of symmetric monoidal 2-categories.