We construct a family of self-affine tiles in $\mathbb{R}^{d}$ ($d\geqslant 2$) with noncollinear digit sets, which naturally generalizes a class studied originally by Q.-R. Deng and K.-S. Lau in $\mathbb{R}^{2}$, and its extension to $\mathbb{R}^{3}$ by the authors. We obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for the tiles to be connected and for their interiors to be contractible.

Given complex numbers w1,…,wn, we define the weight w(X) of a set X of 0–1 vectors as the sum of $w_1^{x_1} \cdots w_n^{x_n}$ over all vectors (x1,…,xn) in X. We present an algorithm which, for a set X defined by a system of homogeneous linear equations with at most r variables per equation and at most c equations per variable, computes w(X) within relative error ∊ > 0 in (rc)O(lnn-ln∊) time provided $|w_j| \leq \beta (r \sqrt{c})^{-1}$ for an absolute constant β > 0 and all j = 1,…,n. A similar algorithm is constructed for computing the weight of a linear code over ${\mathbb F}_p$. Applications include counting weighted perfect matchings in hypergraphs, counting weighted graph homomorphisms, computing weight enumerators of linear codes with sparse code generating matrices, and computing the partition functions of the ferromagnetic Potts model at low temperatures and of the hard-core model at high fugacity on biregular bipartite graphs.

This paper is concerned with the maximisation of the $k$-th eigenvalue of the Laplacian amongst flat tori of unit volume in dimension $d$ as $k$ goes to infinity. We show that in any dimension maximisers exist for any given $k$, but that any sequence of maximisers degenerates as $k$ goes to infinity when the dimension is at most 10. Furthermore, we obtain specific upper and lower bounds for the injectivity radius of any sequence of maximisers. We also prove that flat Klein bottles maximising the $k$-th eigenvalue of the Laplacian exhibit the same behaviour. These results contrast with those obtained recently by Gittins and Larson, stating that sequences of optimal cuboids for either Dirichlet or Neumann boundary conditions converge to the cube no matter the dimension. We obtain these results via Weyl asymptotics with explicit control of the remainder in terms of the injectivity radius. We reduce the problem at hand to counting lattice points inside anisotropically expanding domains, where we generalise methods of Yu. Kordyukov and A. Yakovlev by considering domains that expand at different rates in various directions.

We establish a combinatorial model for the Boardman–Vogt tensor product of several absolutely free operads, that is, free symmetric operads that are also free as 𝕊-modules. Our results imply that such a tensor product is always a free 𝕊-module, in contrast with the results of Kock and Bremner–Madariaga on hidden commutativity for the Boardman–Vogt tensor square of the operad of non-unital associative algebras.

We give a bound on the H-constants of configurations of smooth curves having transversal intersection points only on an algebraic surface of non-negative Kodaira dimension. We also study in detail configurations of lines on smooth complete intersections $X \subset \mathbb{P}_{\mathbb{C}}^{n + 2}$ of multi-degree d = (d1, …, dn), and we provide a sharp and uniform bound on their H-constants, which only depends on d.

We prove a lower bound on the entropy of sphere packings of $\mathbb{R}^{d}$ of density $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E9}(d\cdot 2^{-d})$. The entropy measures how plentiful such packings are, and our result is significantly stronger than the trivial lower bound that can be obtained from the mere existence of a dense packing. Our method also provides a new, statistical-physics-based proof of the $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FA}(d\cdot 2^{-d})$ lower bound on the maximum sphere packing density by showing that the expected packing density of a random configuration from the hard sphere model is at least $(1+o_{d}(1))\log (2/\sqrt{3})d\cdot 2^{-d}$ when the ratio of the fugacity parameter to the volume covered by a single sphere is at least $3^{-d/2}$. Such a bound on the sphere packing density was first achieved by Rogers, with subsequent improvements to the leading constant by Davenport and Rogers, Ball, Vance, and Venkatesh.

We study local properties of the Bakry–Émery curvature function ${\mathcal{K}}_{G,x}:(0,\infty ]\rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ at a vertex $x$ of a graph $G$ systematically. Here ${\mathcal{K}}_{G,x}({\mathcal{N}})$ is defined as the optimal curvature lower bound ${\mathcal{K}}$ in the Bakry–Émery curvature-dimension inequality $CD({\mathcal{K}},{\mathcal{N}})$ that $x$ satisfies. We provide upper and lower bounds for the curvature functions, introduce fundamental concepts like curvature sharpness and $S^{1}$-out regularity, and relate the curvature functions of $G$ with various spectral properties of (weighted) graphs constructed from local structures of $G$. We prove that the curvature functions of the Cartesian product of two graphs $G_{1},G_{2}$ are equal to an abstract product of curvature functions of $G_{1},G_{2}$. We explore the curvature functions of Cayley graphs and many particular (families of) examples. We present various conjectures and construct an infinite increasing family of 6-regular graphs which satisfy $CD(0,\infty )$ but are not Cayley graphs.

For each $n\geqslant 2$ we construct a measurable subset of the unit ball in $\mathbb{R}^{n}$ that does not contain pairs of points at distance 1 and whose volume is greater than $(1/2)^{n}$ times the volume of the unit ball. This disproves a conjecture of Larman and Rogers from 1972.

We consider point distributions in compact connected two-point homogeneous spaces (Riemannian symmetric spaces of rank one). All such spaces are known: they are the spheres in the Euclidean spaces, the real, complex and quaternionic projective spaces and the octonionic projective plane. For all such spaces the best possible bounds for the quadratic discrepancies and sums of pairwise distances are obtained in the paper (Theorems 2.1 and 2.2). Distributions of points of $t$-designs on such spaces are also considered (Theorem 2.3). In particular, it is shown that the optimal $t$-designs meet the best possible bounds for quadratic discrepancies and sums of pairwise distances (Corollary 2.1). Our approach is based on the Fourier analysis on two-point homogeneous spaces and explicit spherical function expansions for discrepancies and sums of distances (Theorems 4.1 and 4.2).

In this paper we discuss some dimension results for triangle sets of compact sets in $\mathbb{R}^{2}$. In particular we prove that for any compact set $F$ in $\mathbb{R}^{2}$, the triangle set $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E5}(F)$ satisfies

$$\begin{eqnarray}\dim _{\text{A}}\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E5}(F)\geqslant {\textstyle \frac{3}{2}}\dim _{\text{A}}F.\end{eqnarray}$$

$\dim _{\text{A}}F>1$

$$\begin{eqnarray}\dim _{\text{A}}\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E5}(F)\geqslant 1+\dim _{\text{A}}F.\end{eqnarray}$$

$\dim _{\text{A}}F>4/3$

$$\begin{eqnarray}\dim _{\text{A}}\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E5}(F)\geqslant \min \{{\textstyle \frac{5}{2}}\dim _{\text{A}}F-1,3\}.\end{eqnarray}$$

$F$

$$\begin{eqnarray}\text{}\underline{\dim _{\text{B}}}F\geqslant {\textstyle \frac{3}{2}}\text{}\underline{\dim _{\text{B}}}\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E5}(F)\quad \text{and}\quad \overline{\dim _{\text{B}}}F\geqslant {\textstyle \frac{3}{2}}\overline{\dim _{\text{B}}}\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E5}(F).\end{eqnarray}$$

In 1885, Fedorov discovered that a convex domain can form a lattice tiling of the Euclidean plane if and only if it is a parallelogram or a centrally symmetric hexagon. This paper proves the following results. Except for parallelograms and centrally symmetric hexagons, there are no other convex domains that can form two-, three- or four-fold lattice tilings in the Euclidean plane. However, there are both octagons and decagons that can form five-fold lattice tilings. Whenever $n\geqslant 3$, there are non-parallelohedral polytopes that can form five-fold lattice tilings in the $n$-dimensional Euclidean space.

We give the first polynomial upper bound on the mixing time of the edge-flip Markov chain for unbiased dyadic tilings, resolving an open problem originally posed by Janson, Randall and Spencer in 2002 [14]. A dyadic tiling of size n is a tiling of the unit square by n non-overlapping dyadic rectangles, each of area 1/n, where a dyadic rectangle is any rectangle that can be written in the form [a2−s, (a + 1)2−s] × [b2−t, (b + 1)2−t] for a, b, s, t ∈ ℤ⩾ 0. The edge-flip Markov chain selects a random edge of the tiling and replaces it with its perpendicular bisector if doing so yields a valid dyadic tiling. Specifically, we show that the relaxation time of the edge-flip Markov chain for dyadic tilings is at most O(n4.09), which implies that the mixing time is at most O(n5.09). We complement this by showing that the relaxation time is at least Ω(n1.38), improving upon the previously best lower bound of Ω(n log n) coming from the diameter of the chain.

It was shown by Gruslys, Leader and Tan that any finite subset of $\mathbb{Z}^{n}$ tiles $\mathbb{Z}^{d}$ for some $d$. The first non-trivial case is the punctured interval, which consists of the interval $\{-k,\ldots ,k\}\subset \mathbb{Z}$ with its middle point removed: they showed that this tiles $\mathbb{Z}^{d}$ for $d=2k^{2}$, and they asked if the dimension needed tends to infinity with $k$. In this note we answer this question: we show that, perhaps surprisingly, every punctured interval tiles $\mathbb{Z}^{4}$.

In the realm of Delone sets in locally compact, second countable Hausdorff groups, we develop a dynamical systems approach in order to study the continuity behavior of measured quantities arising from point sets. A special focus is both on the autocorrelation, as well as on the density of states for random bounded operators. It is shown that for uniquely ergodic limit systems, the latter measures behave continuously with respect to the Chabauty–Fell convergence of hulls. In the special situation of Euclidean spaces, our results complement recent developments in describing spectra as topological limits: we show that the measured quantities under consideration can be approximated via periodic analogs.

Let C be a bounded convex object in ℝd, and let P be a set of n points lying outside C. Further, let cp, cq be two integers with 1 ⩽ cq ⩽ cp ⩽ n - ⌊d/2⌋, such that every cp + ⌊d/2⌋ points of P contain a subset of size cq + ⌊d/2⌋ whose convex hull is disjoint from C. Then our main theorem states the existence of a partition of P into a small number of subsets, each of whose convex hulls are disjoint from C. Our proof is constructive and implies that such a partition can be computed in polynomial time.

In particular, our general theorem implies polynomial bounds for Hadwiger--Debrunner (p, q) numbers for balls in ℝd. For example, it follows from our theorem that when p > q = (1+β)⋅d/2 for β > 0, then any set of balls satisfying the (p, q)-property can be hit by O((1+β)2d2p1+1/β logp) points. This is the first improvement over a nearly 60 year-old exponential bound of roughly O(2d).

Our results also complement the results obtained in a recent work of Keller, Smorodinsky and Tardos where, apart from improvements to the bound on HD(p, q) for convex sets in ℝd for various ranges of p and q, a polynomial bound is obtained for regions with low union complexity in the plane.

A set of points in d-dimensional Euclidean space is almost equidistant if, among any three points of the set, some two are at distance 1. We show that an almost-equidistant set in ℝd has cardinality O(d4/3).

We study a combinatorial problem that recently arose in the context of shape optimization: among all triangles with vertices $(0,0)$, $(x,0)$, and $(0,y)$ and fixed area, which one encloses the most lattice points from $\mathbb{Z}_{{>}0}^{2}$? Moreover, does its shape necessarily converge to the isosceles triangle $(x=y)$ as the area becomes large? Laugesen and Liu suggested that, in contrast to similar problems, there might not be a limiting shape. We prove that the limiting set is indeed non-trivial and contains infinitely many elements. We also show that there exist “bad” areas where no triangle is particularly good at capturing lattice points and show that there exists an infinite set of slopes $y/x$ such that any associated triangle captures more lattice points than any other fixed triangle for infinitely many (and arbitrarily large) areas; this set of slopes is a fractal subset of $[1/3,3]$ and has Minkowski dimension of at most $3/4$.

Given any positive integers $m$ and $d$, we say a sequence of points $(x_{i})_{i\in I}$ in $\mathbb{R}^{m}$ is Lipschitz-$d$-controlling if one can select suitable values $y_{i}\;(i\in I)$ such that for every Lipschitz function $f\,:\,\mathbb{R}^{m}\,\rightarrow \,\mathbb{R}^{d}$ there exists $i$ with $|f(x_{i})\,-\,y_{i}|\,<\,1$. We conjecture that for every $m\leqslant d$, a sequence $(x_{i})_{i\in I}\subset \mathbb{R}^{m}$ is $d$-controlling if and only if

$$\begin{eqnarray}\displaystyle \sup _{n\in \mathbb{N}}\frac{|\{i\in I:|x_{i}|\leqslant n\}|}{n^{d}}=\infty . & & \displaystyle \nonumber\end{eqnarray}$$

$d$

$m=1$

We prove that there is a set F in the plane so that the distance between any two points of F is at least 1, and for any positive ϵ < 1, and every line segment in the plane of length at least ϵ−1−o(1), there is a point of F within distance ϵ of the segment. This is tight up to the o(1)-term in the exponent, improving earlier estimates of Peres, of Solomon and Weiss, and of Adiceam.

We prove some vanishing theorems for the cohomology groups of local systems associated to Laurent polynomials. In particular, we extend one of the results of Gelfand et al. [Generalized Euler integrals and$A$-hypergeometric functions, Adv. Math. 84 (1990), 255–271] to various directions. In the course of the proof, some properties of vanishing cycles of perverse sheaves and twisted Morse theory are used.