The effective potential of an M-matrix

Marcel Filoche, Svitlana Mayboroda, and I have just uploaded to the arXiv our preprint “The effective potential of an -matrix“. This paper explores the analogue of the effective potential of Schrödinger operators provided by the “landscape function” , when one works with a certain type of self-adjoint matrix known as an -matrix instead of a Schrödinger operator.

Suppose one has an eigenfunction

of a Schrödinger operator , where is the Laplacian on , is a potential, and is an energy. Where would one expect the eigenfunction to be concentrated? If the potential is smooth and slowly varying, the correspondence principle suggests that the eigenfunction should be mostly concentrated in the potential energy wells , with an exponentially decaying amount of tunnelling between the wells. One way to rigorously establish such an exponential decay is through an argument of Agmon, which we will sketch later in this post, which gives an exponentially decaying upper bound (in an sense) of eigenfunctions in terms of the distance to the wells in terms of a certain “Agmon metric” on determined by the potential and energy level (or any upper bound on this energy). Similar exponential decay results can also be obtained for discrete Schrödinger matrix models, in which the domain is replaced with a discrete set such as the lattice , and the Laplacian is replaced by a discrete analogue such as a graph Laplacian.

When the potential is very “rough”, as occurs for instance in the random potentials arising in the theory of Anderson localisation, the Agmon bounds, while still true, become very weak because the wells are dispersed in a fairly dense fashion throughout the domain , and the eigenfunction can tunnel relatively easily between different wells. However, as was first discovered in 2012 by my two coauthors, in these situations one can replace the rough potential by a smoother effective potential , with the eigenfunctions typically localised to a single connected component of the effective wells . In fact, a good choice of effective potential comes from locating the landscape function , which is the solution to the equation with reasonable behavior at infinity, and which is non-negative from the maximum principle, and then the reciprocal of this landscape function serves as an effective potential.

There are now several explanations for why this particular choice is a good effective potential. Perhaps the simplest (as found for instance in this recent paper of Arnold, David, Jerison, and my two coauthors) is the following observation: if is an eigenvector for with energy , then is an eigenvector for with the same energy , thus the original Schrödinger operator is conjugate to a (variable coefficient, but still in divergence form) Schrödinger operator with potential instead of . Closely related to this, we have the integration by parts identity

for any reasonable function , thus again highlighting the emergence of the effective potential .

These particular explanations seem rather specific to the Schrödinger equation (continuous or discrete); we have for instance not been able to find similar identities to explain an effective potential for the bi-Schrödinger operator .

In this paper, we demonstrate the (perhaps surprising) fact that effective potentials continue to exist for operators that bear very little resemblance to Schrödinger operators. Our chosen model is that of an -matrix: self-adjoint positive definite matrices whose off-diagonal entries are negative. This model includes discrete Schrödinger operators (with non-negative potentials) but can allow for significantly more non-local interactions. The analogue of the landscape function would then be the vector , where denotes the vector with all entries . Our main result, roughly speaking, asserts that an eigenvector of will then be exponentially localised to the “potential wells” , where denotes the coordinates of the landscape function . In particular, we establish the inequality

if is normalised in , where the connectivity is the maximum number of non-zero entries of in any row or column, are the coefficients of , and is a certain moderately complicated but explicit metric function on the spatial domain. Informally, this inequality asserts that the eigenfunction should decay like or faster. Indeed, our numerics show a very strong log-linear relationship between and , although it appears that our exponent is not quite optimal. We also provide an associated localisation result which is technical to state but very roughly asserts that a given eigenvector will in fact be localised to a single connected component of unless there is a resonance between two wells (by which we mean that an eigenvalue for a localisation of associated to one well is extremely close to an eigenvalue for a localisation of associated to another well); such localisation is also strongly supported by numerics. (Analogous results for Schrödinger operators had been previously obtained by the previously mentioned paper of Arnold, David, Jerison, and my two coauthors, and to quantum graphs in a very recent paper of Harrell and Maltsev.)

Our approach is based on Agmon’s methods, which we interpret as a double commutator method, and in particular relying on exploiting the negative definiteness of certain double commutator operators. In the case of Schrödinger operators , this negative definiteness is provided by the identity

for any sufficiently reasonable functions , where we view (like ) as a multiplier operator. To exploit this, we use the commutator identity

valid for any after a brief calculation. The double commutator identity then tells us that

If we choose to be a non-negative weight and let for an eigenfunction , then we can write

and we conclude that

We have considerable freedom in this inequality to select the functions . If we select , we obtain the clean inequality

If we take to be a function which equals on the wells but increases exponentially away from these wells, in such a way that

outside of the wells, we can obtain the estimate

which then gives an exponential type decay of away from the wells. This is basically the classic exponential decay estimate of Agmon; one can basically take to be the distance to the wells with respect to the Euclidean metric conformally weighted by a suitably normalised version of . If we instead select to be the landscape function , (3) then gives

and by selecting appropriately this gives an exponential decay estimate away from the effective wells , using a metric weighted by .

It turns out that this argument extends without much difficulty to the -matrix setting. The analogue of the crucial double commutator identity (2) is

for any diagonal matrix . The remainder of the Agmon type arguments go through after making the natural modifications.

Numerically we have also found some aspects of the landscape theory to persist beyond the -matrix setting, even though the double commutators cease being negative definite, so this may not yet be the end of the story, but it does at least demonstrate that utility the landscape does not purely rely on identities such as (1).

Inverting the Schur complement, and large-dimensional Gelfand-Tsetlin patterns

Suppose we have an matrix that is expressed in block-matrix form as

where is an matrix, is an matrix, is an matrix, and is a matrix for some . If is invertible, we can use the technique of Schur complementation to express the inverse of (if it exists) in terms of the inverse of , and the other components of course. Indeed, to solve the equation

where are column vectors and are column vectors, we can expand this out as a system

Using the invertibility of , we can write the first equation as

and substituting this into the second equation yields

and thus (assuming that is invertible)

and then inserting this back into (1) gives

Comparing this with

we have managed to express the inverse of as

One can consider the inverse problem: given the inverse of , does one have a nice formula for the inverse of the minor ? Trying to recover this directly from (2) looks somewhat messy. However, one can proceed as follows. Let denote the matrix

(with the identity matrix), and let be its transpose:

Then for any scalar (which we identify with times the identity matrix), one has

and hence by (2)

noting that the inverses here will exist for large enough. Taking limits as , we conclude that

On the other hand, by the Woodbury matrix identity (discussed in this previous blog post), we have

and hence on taking limits and comparing with the preceding identity, one has

This achieves the aim of expressing the inverse of the minor in terms of the inverse of the full matrix. Taking traces and rearranging, we conclude in particular that

In the case, this can be simplified to

where is the basis column vector.

We can apply this identity to understand how the spectrum of an random matrix relates to that of its top left minor . Subtracting any complex multiple of the identity from (and hence from ), we can relate the Stieltjes transform of with the Stieltjes transform of :

At this point we begin to proceed informally. Assume for sake of argument that the random matrix is Hermitian, with distribution that is invariant under conjugation by the unitary group ; for instance, could be drawn from the Gaussian Unitary Ensemble (GUE), or alternatively could be of the form for some real diagonal matrix and a unitary matrix drawn randomly from using Haar measure. To fix normalisations we will assume that the eigenvalues of are typically of size . Then is also Hermitian and -invariant. Furthermore, the law of will be the same as the law of , where is now drawn uniformly from the unit sphere (independently of ). Diagonalising into eigenvalues and eigenvectors , we have

One can think of as a random (complex) Gaussian vector, divided by the magnitude of that vector (which, by the Chernoff inequality, will concentrate to ). Thus the coefficients with respect to the orthonormal basis can be thought of as independent (complex) Gaussian vectors, divided by that magnitude. Using this and the Chernoff inequality again, we see (for distance away from the real axis at least) that one has the concentration of measure

and thus

(that is to say, the diagonal entries of are roughly constant). Similarly we have

Inserting this into (5) and discarding terms of size , we thus conclude the approximate relationship

This can be viewed as a difference equation for the Stieltjes transform of top left minors of . Iterating this equation, and formally replacing the difference equation by a differential equation in the large limit, we see that when is large and for some , one expects the top left minor of to have Stieltjes transform

where solves the Burgers-type equation

with initial data .

Example 1 If is a constant multiple of the identity, then . One checks that is a steady state solution to (7), which is unsurprising given that all minors of are also times the identity.

Example 2 If is GUE normalised so that each entry has variance , then by the semi-circular law (see previous notes) one has (using an appropriate branch of the square root). One can then verify the self-similar solution

to (7), which is consistent with the fact that a top minor of also has the law of GUE, with each entry having variance when .

One can justify the approximation (6) given a sufficiently good well-posedness theory for the equation (7). We will not do so here, but will note that (as with the classical inviscid Burgers equation) the equation can be solved exactly (formally, at least) by the method of characteristics. For any initial position , we consider the characteristic flow formed by solving the ODE

with initial data , ignoring for this discussion the problems of existence and uniqueness. Then from the chain rule, the equation (7) implies that

and thus . Inserting this back into (8) we see that

and thus (7) may be solved implicitly via the equation

for all and .

Remark 3 In practice, the equation (9) may stop working when crosses the real axis, as (7) does not necessarily hold in this region. It is a cute exercise (ultimately coming from the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality) to show that this crossing always happens, for instance if has positive imaginary part then necessarily has negative or zero imaginary part.

Example 4 Suppose we have as in Example 1. Then (9) becomes

for any , which after making the change of variables becomes

as in Example 1.

Example 5 Suppose we have

as in Example 2. Then (9) becomes

If we write

one can calculate that

and hence

which gives

One can recover the spectral measure from the Stieltjes transform as the weak limit of as ; we write this informally as

In this informal notation, we have for instance that

which can be interpreted as the fact that the Cauchy distributions converge weakly to the Dirac mass at as . Similarly, the spectral measure associated to (10) is the semicircular measure .

If we let be the spectral measure associated to , then the curve from to the space of measures is the high-dimensional limit of a Gelfand-Tsetlin pattern (discussed in this previous post), if the pattern is randomly generated amongst all matrices with spectrum asymptotic to as . For instance, if , then the curve is , corresponding to a pattern that is entirely filled with ‘s. If instead is a semicircular distribution, then the pattern is

thus at height from the top, the pattern is semicircular on the interval . The interlacing property of Gelfand-Tsetlin patterns translates to the claim that (resp. ) is non-decreasing (resp. non-increasing) in for any fixed . In principle one should be able to establish these monotonicity claims directly from the PDE (7) or from the implicit solution (9), but it was not clear to me how to do so.

An interesting example of such a limiting Gelfand-Tsetlin pattern occurs when , which corresponds to being , where is an orthogonal projection to a random -dimensional subspace of . Here we have

and so (9) in this case becomes

A tedious calculation then gives the solution

For , there are simple poles at , and the associated measure is

This reflects the interlacing property, which forces of the eigenvalues of the minor to be equal to (resp. ). For , the poles disappear and one just has

For , one has an inverse semicircle distribution

There is presumably a direct geometric explanation of this fact (basically describing the singular values of the product of two random orthogonal projections to half-dimensional subspaces of ), but I do not know of one off-hand.

The evolution of can also be understood using the -transform and -transform from free probability. Formally, letlet be the inverse of , thus

for all , and then define the -transform

The equation (9) may be rewritten as

and hence

or equivalently

See these previous notes for a discussion of free probability topics such as the -transform.

Example 6 If then the transform is .

Example 7 If is given by (10), then the transform is

Example 8 If is given by (11), then the transform is

This simple relationship (12) is essentially due to Nica and Speicher (thanks to Dima Shylakhtenko for this reference). It has the remarkable consequence that when is the reciprocal of a natural number , then is the free arithmetic mean of copies of , that is to say is the free convolution of copies of , pushed forward by the map . In terms of random matrices, this is asserting that the top minor of a random matrix has spectral measure approximately equal to that of an arithmetic mean of independent copies of , so that the process of taking top left minors is in some sense a continuous analogue of the process of taking freely independent arithmetic means. There ought to be a geometric proof of this assertion, but I do not know of one. In the limit (or ), the -transform becomes linear and the spectral measure becomes semicircular, which is of course consistent with the free central limit theorem.

In a similar vein, if one defines the function

and inverts it to obtain a function with

for all , then the -transform is defined by

Writing

for any , , we have

and so (9) becomes

which simplifies to

replacing by we obtain

and thus

and hence

One can compute to be the -transform of the measure ; from the link between -transforms and free products (see e.g. these notes of Guionnet), we conclude that is the free product of and . This is consistent with the random matrix theory interpretation, since is also the spectral measure of , where is the orthogonal projection to the span of the first basis elements, so in particular has spectral measure . If is unitarily invariant then (by a fundamental result of Voiculescu) it is asymptotically freely independent of , so the spectral measure of is asymptotically the free product of that of and of .

On the sign patterns of entrywise positivity preservers in fixed dimension

Apoorva Khare and I have just uploaded to the arXiv our paper “On the sign patterns of entrywise positivity preservers in fixed dimension“. This paper explores the relationship between positive definiteness of Hermitian matrices, and entrywise operations on these matrices. The starting point for this theory is the Schur product theorem, which asserts that if and are two Hermitian matrices that are positive semi-definite, then their Hadamard product

is also positive semi-definite. (One should caution that the Hadamard product is not the same as the usual matrix product.) To prove this theorem, first observe that the claim is easy when and are rank one positive semi-definite matrices, since in this case is also a rank one positive semi-definite matrix. The general case then follows by noting from the spectral theorem that a general positive semi-definite matrix can be expressed as a non-negative linear combination of rank one positive semi-definite matrices, and using the bilinearity of the Hadamard product and the fact that the set of positive semi-definite matrices form a convex cone. A modification of this argument also lets one replace “positive semi-definite” by “positive definite” in the statement of the Schur product theorem.

One corollary of the Schur product theorem is that any polynomial with non-negative coefficients is entrywise positivity preserving on the space of positive semi-definite Hermitian matrices, in the sense that for any matrix in , the entrywise application

of to is also positive semi-definite. (As before, one should caution that is not the application of to by the usual functional calculus.) Indeed, one can expand

where is the Hadamard product of copies of , and the claim now follows from the Schur product theorem and the fact that is a convex cone.

A slight variant of this argument, already observed by Pólya and Szegö in 1925, shows that if is any subset of and

is a power series with non-negative coefficients that is absolutely and uniformly convergent on , then will be entrywise positivity preserving on the set of positive definite matrices with entries in . (In the case that is of the form , such functions are precisely the absolutely monotonic functions on .)

In the work of Schoenberg and of Rudin, we have a converse: if is a function that is entrywise positivity preserving on for all , then it must be of the form (1) with . Variants of this result, with replaced by other domains, appear in the work of Horn, Vasudeva, and Guillot-Khare-Rajaratnam.

This gives a satisfactory classification of functions that are entrywise positivity preservers in all dimensions simultaneously. However, the question remains as to what happens if one fixes the dimension , in which case one may have a larger class of entrywise positivity preservers. For instance, in the trivial case , a function would be entrywise positivity preserving on if and only if is non-negative on . For higher , there is a necessary condition of Horn (refined slightly by Guillot-Khare-Rajaratnam) which asserts (at least in the case of smooth ) that all derivatives of at zero up to order must be non-negative in order for to be entrywise positivity preserving on for some . In particular, if is of the form (1), then must be non-negative. In fact, a stronger assertion can be made, namely that the first non-zero coefficients in (1) (if they exist) must be positive, or equivalently any negative term in (1) must be preceded (though not necessarily immediately) by at least positive terms. If is of the form (1) is entrywise positivity preserving on the larger set , one can furthermore show that any negative term in (1) must also be followed (though not necessarily immediately) by at least positive terms.

The main result of this paper is that these sign conditions are the only constraints for entrywise positivity preserving power series. More precisely:

Theorem 1 For each , let be a sign.

• Suppose that any negative sign is preceded by at least positive signs (thus there exists with ). Then, for any , there exists a convergent power series (1) on , with each having the sign of , which is entrywise positivity preserving on .
• Suppose in addition that any negative sign is followed by at least positive signs (thus there exists with ). Then there exists a convergent power series (1) on , with each having the sign of , which is entrywise positivity preserving on .

One can ask the same question with or replaced by other domains such as , or the complex disk , but it turns out that there are far fewer entrywise positivity preserving functions in those cases basically because of the non-trivial zeroes of Schur polynomials in these ranges; see the paper for further discussion. We also have some quantitative bounds on how negative some of the coefficients can be compared to the positive coefficients, but they are a bit technical to state here.

The heart of the proofs of these results is an analysis of the determinants of polynomials applied entrywise to rank one matrices ; the positivity of these determinants can be used (together with a continuity argument) to establish the positive definiteness of for various ranges of and . Using the Cauchy-Binet formula, one can rewrite such determinants as linear combinations of squares of magnitudes of generalised Vandermonde determinants

where and the signs of the coefficients in the linear combination are determined by the signs of the coefficients of . The task is then to find upper and lower bounds for the magnitudes of such generalised Vandermonde determinants. These determinants oscillate in sign, which makes the problem look difficult; however, an algebraic miracle intervenes, namely the factorisation

of the generalised Vandermonde determinant into the ordinary Vandermonde determinant

and a Schur polynomial applied to , where the weight of the Schur polynomial is determined by in a simple fashion. The problem then boils down to obtaining upper and lower bounds for these Schur polynomials. Because we are restricting attention to matrices taking values in or , the entries of can be taken to be non-negative. One can then take advantage of the total positivity of the Schur polynomials to compare these polynomials with a monomial, at which point one can obtain good criteria for to be positive definite when is a rank one positive definite matrix .

If we allow the exponents to be real numbers rather than integers (thus replacing polynomials or power series by Pusieux series or Hahn series), then we lose the above algebraic miracle, but we can replace it with a geometric miracle, namely the Harish-Chandra-Itzykson-Zuber identity, which I discussed in this previous blog post. This factors the above generalised Vandermonde determinant as the product of the ordinary Vandermonde determinant and an integral of a positive quantity over the orthogonal group, which one can again compare with a monomial after some fairly elementary estimates.

It remains to understand what happens for more general positive semi-definite matrices . Here we use a trick of FitzGerald and Horn to amplify the rank one case to the general case, by expressing a general positive semi-definite matrix as a linear combination of a rank one matrix and another positive semi-definite matrix that vanishes on the last row and column (and is thus effectively a positive definite matrix). Using the fundamental theorem of calculus to continuously deform the rank one matrix to in the direction , one can then obtain positivity results for from positivity results for combined with an induction hypothesis on .

A wave equation approach to automorphic forms in analytic number theory

The Poincaré upper half-plane (with a boundary consisting of the real line together with the point at infinity ) carries an action of the projective special linear group

via fractional linear transformations:

Here and in the rest of the post we will abuse notation by identifying elements of the special linear group with their equivalence class in ; this will occasionally create or remove a factor of two in our formulae, but otherwise has very little effect, though one has to check that various definitions and expressions (such as (1)) are unaffected if one replaces a matrix by its negation . In particular, we recommend that the reader ignore the signs that appear from time to time in the discussion below.

As the action of on is transitive, and any given point in (e.g. ) has a stabiliser isomorphic to the projective rotation group , we can view the Poincaré upper half-plane as a homogeneous space for , and more specifically the quotient space of of a maximal compact subgroup . In fact, we can make the half-plane a symmetric space for , by endowing with the Riemannian metric

(using Cartesian coordinates ), which is invariant with respect to the action. Like any other Riemannian metric, the metric on generates a number of other important geometric objects on , such as the distance function which can be computed to be given by the formula

the volume measure , which can be computed to be

and the Laplace-Beltrami operator, which can be computed to be (here we use the negative definite sign convention for ). As the metric was -invariant, all of these quantities arising from the metric are similarly -invariant in the appropriate sense.

The Gauss curvature of the Poincaré half-plane can be computed to be the constant , thus is a model for two-dimensional hyperbolic geometry, in much the same way that the unit sphere in is a model for two-dimensional spherical geometry (or is a model for two-dimensional Euclidean geometry). (Indeed, is isomorphic (via projection to a null hyperplane) to the upper unit hyperboloid in the Minkowski spacetime , which is the direct analogue of the unit sphere in Euclidean spacetime or the plane in Galilean spacetime .)

One can inject arithmetic into this geometric structure by passing from the Lie group to the full modular group

or congruence subgroups such as

for natural number , or to the discrete stabiliser of the point at infinity:

These are discrete subgroups of , nested by the subgroup inclusions

There are many further discrete subgroups of (known collectively as Fuchsian groups) that one could consider, but we will focus attention on these three groups in this post.

Any discrete subgroup of generates a quotient space , which in general will be a non-compact two-dimensional orbifold. One can understand such a quotient space by working with a fundamental domain – a set consisting of a single representative of each of the orbits of in . This fundamental domain is by no means uniquely defined, but if the fundamental domain is chosen with some reasonable amount of regularity, one can view as the fundamental domain with the boundaries glued together in an appropriate sense. Among other things, fundamental domains can be used to induce a volume measure on from the volume measure on (restricted to a fundamental domain). By abuse of notation we will refer to both measures simply as when there is no chance of confusion.

For instance, a fundamental domain for is given (up to null sets) by the strip , with identifiable with the cylinder formed by gluing together the two sides of the strip. A fundamental domain for is famously given (again up to null sets) by an upper portion , with the left and right sides again glued to each other, and the left and right halves of the circular boundary glued to itself. A fundamental domain for can be formed by gluing together

copies of a fundamental domain for in a rather complicated but interesting fashion.

While fundamental domains can be a convenient choice of coordinates to work with for some computations (as well as for drawing appropriate pictures), it is geometrically more natural to avoid working explicitly on such domains, and instead work directly on the quotient spaces . In order to analyse functions on such orbifolds, it is convenient to lift such functions back up to and identify them with functions which are -automorphic in the sense that for all and . Such functions will be referred to as -automorphic forms, or automorphic forms for short (we always implicitly assume all such functions to be measurable). (Strictly speaking, these are the automorphic forms with trivial factor of automorphy; one can certainly consider other factors of automorphy, particularly when working with holomorphic modular forms, which corresponds to sections of a more non-trivial line bundle over than the trivial bundle that is implicitly present when analysing scalar functions . However, we will not discuss this (important) more general situation here.)

An important way to create a -automorphic form is to start with a non-automorphic function obeying suitable decay conditions (e.g. bounded with compact support will suffice) and form the Poincaré series defined by

which is clearly -automorphic. (One could equivalently write in place of here; there are good argument for both conventions, but I have ultimately decided to use the convention, which makes explicit computations a little neater at the cost of making the group actions work in the opposite order.) Thus we naturally see sums over associated with -automorphic forms. A little more generally, given a subgroup of and a -automorphic function of suitable decay, we can form a relative Poincaré series by

where is any fundamental domain for , that is to say a subset of consisting of exactly one representative for each right coset of . As is -automorphic, we see (if has suitable decay) that does not depend on the precise choice of fundamental domain, and is -automorphic. These operations are all compatible with each other, for instance . A key example of Poincaré series are the Eisenstein series, although there are of course many other Poincaré series one can consider by varying the test function .

For future reference we record the basic but fundamental unfolding identities

for any function with sufficient decay, and any -automorphic function of reasonable growth (e.g. bounded and compact support, and bounded, will suffice). Note that is viewed as a function on on the left-hand side, and as a -automorphic function on on the right-hand side. More generally, one has

whenever are discrete subgroups of , is a -automorphic function with sufficient decay on , and is a -automorphic (and thus also -automorphic) function of reasonable growth. These identities will allow us to move fairly freely between the three domains , , and in our analysis.

When computing various statistics of a Poincaré series , such as its values at special points , or the quantity , expressions of interest to analytic number theory naturally emerge. We list three basic examples of this below, discussed somewhat informally in order to highlight the main ideas rather than the technical details.

The first example we will give concerns the problem of estimating the sum

where is the divisor function. This can be rewritten (by factoring and ) as

which is basically a sum over the full modular group . At this point we will “cheat” a little by moving to the related, but different, sum

This sum is not exactly the same as (8), but will be a little easier to handle, and it is plausible that the methods used to handle this sum can be modified to handle (8). Observe from (2) and some calculation that the distance between and is given by the formula

and so one can express the above sum as

(the factor of coming from the quotient by in the projective special linear group); one can express this as , where and is the indicator function of the ball . Thus we see that expressions such as (7) are related to evaluations of Poincaré series. (In practice, it is much better to use smoothed out versions of indicator functions in order to obtain good control on sums such as (7) or (9), but we gloss over this technical detail here.)

The second example concerns the relative

of the sum (7). Note from multiplicativity that (7) can be written as , which is superficially very similar to (10), but with the key difference that the polynomial is irreducible over the integers.

As with (7), we may expand (10) as

At first glance this does not look like a sum over a modular group, but one can manipulate this expression into such a form in one of two (closely related) ways. First, observe that any factorisation of into Gaussian integers gives rise (upon taking norms) to an identity of the form , where and . Conversely, by using the unique factorisation of the Gaussian integers, every identity of the form gives rise to a factorisation of the form , essentially uniquely up to units. Now note that is of the form if and only if , in which case . Thus we can essentially write the above sum as something like

and one the modular group is now manifest. An equivalent way to see these manipulations is as follows. A triple of natural numbers with gives rise to a positive quadratic form of normalised discriminant equal to with integer coefficients (it is natural here to allow to take integer values rather than just natural number values by essentially doubling the sum). The group acts on the space of such quadratic forms in a natural fashion (by composing the quadratic form with the inverse of an element of ). Because the discriminant has class number one (this fact is equivalent to the unique factorisation of the gaussian integers, as discussed in this previous post), every form in this space is equivalent (under the action of some element of ) with the standard quadratic form . In other words, one has

which (up to a harmless sign) is exactly the representation , , introduced earlier, and leads to the same reformulation of the sum (10) in terms of expressions like (11). Similar considerations also apply if the quadratic polynomial is replaced by another quadratic, although one has to account for the fact that the class number may now exceed one (so that unique factorisation in the associated quadratic ring of integers breaks down), and in the positive discriminant case the fact that the group of units might be infinite presents another significant technical problem.

Note that has real part and imaginary part . Thus (11) is (up to a factor of two) the Poincaré series as in the preceding example, except that is now the indicator of the sector .

Sums involving subgroups of the full modular group, such as , often arise when imposing congruence conditions on sums such as (10), for instance when trying to estimate the expression when and are large. As before, one then soon arrives at the problem of evaluating a Poincaré series at one or more special points, where the series is now over rather than .

The third and final example concerns averages of Kloosterman sums

where and is the inverse of in the multiplicative group . It turns out that the norms of Poincaré series or are closely tied to such averages. Consider for instance the quantity

where is a natural number and is a -automorphic form that is of the form

for some integer and some test function , which for sake of discussion we will take to be smooth and compactly supported. Using the unfolding formula (6), we may rewrite (13) as

To compute this, we use the double coset decomposition

where for each , are arbitrarily chosen integers such that . To see this decomposition, observe that every element in outside of can be assumed to have by applying a sign , and then using the row and column operations coming from left and right multiplication by (that is, shifting the top row by an integer multiple of the bottom row, and shifting the right column by an integer multiple of the left column) one can place in the interval and to be any specified integer pair with . From this we see that

and so from further use of the unfolding formula (5) we may expand (13) as

The first integral is just . The second expression is more interesting. We have

so we can write

as

which on shifting by simplifies a little to

and then on scaling by simplifies a little further to

Note that as , we have modulo . Comparing the above calculations with (12), we can thus write (13) as

where

is a certain integral involving and a parameter , but which does not depend explicitly on parameters such as . Thus we have indeed expressed the expression (13) in terms of Kloosterman sums. It is possible to invert this analysis and express varius weighted sums of Kloosterman sums in terms of expressions (possibly involving inner products instead of norms) of Poincaré series, but we will not do so here; see Chapter 16 of Iwaniec and Kowalski for further details.

Traditionally, automorphic forms have been analysed using the spectral theory of the Laplace-Beltrami operator on spaces such as or , so that a Poincaré series such as might be expanded out using inner products of (or, by the unfolding identities, ) with various generalised eigenfunctions of (such as cuspidal eigenforms, or Eisenstein series). With this approach, special functions, and specifically the modified Bessel functions of the second kind, play a prominent role, basically because the -automorphic functions

for and non-zero are generalised eigenfunctions of (with eigenvalue ), and are almost square-integrable on (the norm diverges only logarithmically at one end of the cylinder , while decaying exponentially fast at the other end ).

However, as discussed in this previous post, the spectral theory of an essentially self-adjoint operator such as is basically equivalent to the theory of various solution operators associated to partial differential equations involving that operator, such as the Helmholtz equation , the heat equation , the Schrödinger equation , or the wave equation . Thus, one can hope to rephrase many arguments that involve spectral data of into arguments that instead involve resolvents , heat kernels , Schrödinger propagators , or wave propagators , or involve the PDE more directly (e.g. applying integration by parts and energy methods to solutions of such PDE). This is certainly done to some extent in the existing literature; resolvents and heat kernels, for instance, are often utilised. In this post, I would like to explore the possibility of reformulating spectral arguments instead using the inhomogeneous wave equation

Actually it will be a bit more convenient to normalise the Laplacian by , and look instead at the automorphic wave equation

This equation somewhat resembles a “Klein-Gordon” type equation, except that the mass is imaginary! This would lead to pathological behaviour were it not for the negative curvature, which in principle creates a spectral gap of that cancels out this factor.

The point is that the wave equation approach gives access to some nice PDE techniques, such as energy methods, Sobolev inequalities and finite speed of propagation, which are somewhat submerged in the spectral framework. The wave equation also interacts well with Poincaré series; if for instance and are -automorphic solutions to (15) obeying suitable decay conditions, then their Poincaré series and will be -automorphic solutions to the same equation (15), basically because the Laplace-Beltrami operator commutes with translations. Because of these facts, it is possible to replicate several standard spectral theory arguments in the wave equation framework, without having to deal directly with things like the asymptotics of modified Bessel functions. The wave equation approach to automorphic theory was introduced by Faddeev and Pavlov (using the Lax-Phillips scattering theory), and developed further by by Lax and Phillips, to recover many spectral facts about the Laplacian on modular curves, such as the Weyl law and the Selberg trace formula. Here, I will illustrate this by deriving three basic applications of automorphic methods in a wave equation framework, namely

• Using the Weil bound on Kloosterman sums to derive Selberg’s 3/16 theorem on the least non-trivial eigenvalue for on (discussed previously here);
• Conversely, showing that Selberg’s eigenvalue conjecture (improving Selberg’s bound to the optimal ) implies an optimal bound on (smoothed) sums of Kloosterman sums; and
• Using the same bound to obtain pointwise bounds on Poincaré series similar to the ones discussed above. (Actually, the argument here does not use the wave equation, instead it just uses the Sobolev inequality.)

This post originated from an attempt to finally learn this part of analytic number theory properly, and to see if I could use a PDE-based perspective to understand it better. Ultimately, this is not that dramatic a depature from the standard approach to this subject, but I found it useful to think of things in this fashion, probably due to my existing background in PDE.

I thank Bill Duke and Ben Green for helpful discussions. My primary reference for this theory was Chapters 15, 16, and 21 of Iwaniec and Kowalski.

The standard branch of the matrix logarithm

Because of Euler’s identity , the complex exponential is not injective: for any complex and integer . As such, the complex logarithm is not well-defined as a single-valued function from to . However, after making a branch cut, one can create a branch of the logarithm which is single-valued. For instance, after removing the negative real axis , one has the standard branch of the logarithm, with defined as the unique choice of the complex logarithm of whose imaginary part has magnitude strictly less than . This particular branch has a number of useful additional properties:

• The standard branch is holomorphic on its domain .
• One has for all in the domain . In particular, if is real, then is real.
• One has for all in the domain .

One can then also use the standard branch of the logarithm to create standard branches of other multi-valued functions, for instance creating a standard branch of the square root function. We caution however that the identity can fail for the standard branch (or indeed for any branch of the logarithm).

One can extend this standard branch of the logarithm to complex matrices, or (equivalently) to linear transformations on an -dimensional complex vector space , provided that the spectrum of that matrix or transformation avoids the branch cut . Indeed, from the spectral theorem one can decompose any such as the direct sum of operators on the non-trivial generalised eigenspaces of , where ranges in the spectrum of . For each component of , we define

where is the Taylor expansion of at ; as is nilpotent, only finitely many terms in this Taylor expansion are required. The logarithm is then defined as the direct sum of the .

The matrix standard branch of the logarithm has many pleasant and easily verified properties (often inherited from their scalar counterparts), whenever has no spectrum in :

• (i) We have .
• (ii) If and have no spectrum in , then .
• (iii) If has spectrum in a closed disk in , then , where is the Taylor series of around (which is absolutely convergent in ).
• (iv) depends holomorphically on . (Easily established from (ii), (iii), after covering the spectrum of by disjoint disks; alternatively, one can use the Cauchy integral representation for a contour in the domain enclosing the spectrum of .) In particular, the standard branch of the matrix logarithm is smooth.
• (v) If is any invertible linear or antilinear map, then . In particular, the standard branch of the logarithm commutes with matrix conjugations; and if is real with respect to a complex conjugation operation on (that is to say, an antilinear involution), then is real also.
• (vi) If denotes the transpose of (with the complex dual of ), then . Similarly, if denotes the adjoint of (with the complex conjugate of , i.e. with the conjugated multiplication map ), then .
• (vii) One has .
• (viii) If denotes the spectrum of , then .

As a quick application of the standard branch of the matrix logarithm, we have

Proposition 1 Let be one of the following matrix groups: , , , , , or , where is a non-degenerate real quadratic form (so is isomorphic to a (possibly indefinite) orthogonal group for some . Then any element of whose spectrum avoids is exponential, that is to say for some in the Lie algebra of .

Proof: We just prove this for , as the other cases are similar (or a bit simpler). If , then (viewing as a complex-linear map on , and using the complex bilinear form associated to to identify with its complex dual , then is real and . By the properties (v), (vi), (vii) of the standard branch of the matrix logarithm, we conclude that is real and , and so lies in the Lie algebra , and the claim now follows from (i).

Exercise 2 Show that is not exponential in if . Thus we see that the branch cut in the above proposition is largely necessary. See this paper of Djokovic for a more complete description of the image of the exponential map in classical groups, as well as this previous blog post for some more discussion of the surjectivity (or lack thereof) of the exponential map in Lie groups.

For a slightly less quick application of the standard branch, we have the following result (recently worked out in the answers to this MathOverflow question):

Proposition 3 Let be an element of the split orthogonal group which lies in the connected component of the identity. Then .

The requirement that lie in the identity component is necessary, as the counterexample for shows.

Proof: We think of as a (real) linear transformation on , and write for the quadratic form associated to , so that . We can split , where is the sum of all the generalised eigenspaces corresponding to eigenvalues in , and is the sum of all the remaining eigenspaces. Since and are real, are real (i.e. complex-conjugation invariant) also. For , the restriction of to then lies in , where is the restriction of to , and

The spectrum of consists of positive reals, as well as complex pairs (with equal multiplicity), so . From the preceding proposition we have for some ; this will be important later.

It remains to show that . If has spectrum at then we are done, so we may assume that has spectrum only at (being invertible, has no spectrum at ). We split , where correspond to the portions of the spectrum in , ; these are real, -invariant spaces. We observe that if are generalised eigenspaces of with , then are orthogonal with respect to the (complex-bilinear) inner product associated with ; this is easiest to see first for the actual eigenspaces (since for all ), and the extension to generalised eigenvectors then follows from a routine induction. From this we see that is orthogonal to , and and are null spaces, which by the non-degeneracy of (and hence of the restriction of to ) forces to have the same dimension as , indeed now gives an identification of with . If we let be the restrictions of to , we thus identify with , since lies in ; in particular is invertible. Thus

and so it suffices to show that .

At this point we need to use the hypothesis that lies in the identity component of . This implies (by a continuity argument) that the restriction of to any maximal-dimensional positive subspace has positive determinant (since such a restriction cannot be singular, as this would mean that positive norm vector would map to a non-positive norm vector). Now, as have equal dimension, has a balanced signature, so does also. Since , already lies in the identity component of , and so has positive determinant on any maximal-dimensional positive subspace of . We conclude that has positive determinant on any maximal-dimensional positive subspace of .

We choose a complex basis of , to identify with , which has already been identified with . (In coordinates, are now both of the form , and for .) Then becomes a maximal positive subspace of , and the restriction of to this subspace is conjugate to , so that

But since and is positive definite, so as required.

Random matrices: tail bounds for gaps between eigenvalues

Hoi Nguyen, Van Vu, and myself have just uploaded to the arXiv our paper “Random matrices: tail bounds for gaps between eigenvalues“. This is a followup paper to my recent paper with Van in which we showed that random matrices of Wigner type (such as the adjacency matrix of an Erdös-Renyi graph) asymptotically almost surely had simple spectrum. In the current paper, we push the method further to show that the eigenvalues are not only distinct, but are (with high probability) separated from each other by some negative power of . This follows the now standard technique of replacing any appearance of discrete Littlewood-Offord theory (a key ingredient in our previous paper) with its continuous analogue (inverse theorems for small ball probability). For general Wigner-type matrices (in which the matrix entries are not normalised to have mean zero), we can use the inverse Littlewood-Offord theorem of Nguyen and Vu to obtain (under mild conditions on ) a result of the form

for any and , if is sufficiently large depending on (in a linear fashion), and is sufficiently large depending on . The point here is that can be made arbitrarily large, and also that no continuity or smoothness hypothesis is made on the distribution of the entries. (In the continuous case, one can use the machinery of Wegner estimates to obtain results of this type, as was done in a paper of Erdös, Schlein, and Yau.)

In the mean zero case, it becomes more efficient to use an inverse Littlewood-Offord theorem of Rudelson and Vershynin to obtain (with the normalisation that the entries of have unit variance, so that the eigenvalues of are with high probability), giving the bound

for (one also has good results of this type for smaller values of ). This is only optimal in the regime ; we expect to establish some eigenvalue repulsion, improving the RHS to for real matrices and for complex matrices, but this appears to be a more difficult task (possibly requiring some quadratic inverse Littlewood-Offord theory, rather than just linear inverse Littlewood-Offord theory). However, we can get some repulsion if one works with larger gaps, getting a result roughly of the form

for any fixed and some absolute constant (which we can asymptotically make to be for large , though it ought to be as large as ), by using a higher-dimensional version of the Rudelson-Vershynin inverse Littlewood-Offord theorem.

In the case of Erdös-Renyi graphs, we don’t have mean zero and the Rudelson-Vershynin Littlewood-Offord theorem isn’t quite applicable, but by working carefully through the approach based on the Nguyen-Vu theorem we can almost recover (1), except for a loss of on the RHS.

As a sample applications of the eigenvalue separation results, we can now obtain some information about eigenvectors; for instance, we can show that the components of the eigenvectors all have magnitude at least for some with high probability. (Eigenvectors become much more stable, and able to be studied in isolation, once their associated eigenvalue is well separated from the other eigenvalues; see this previous blog post for more discussion.)

Random matrices have simple spectrum

Van Vu and I have just uploaded to the arXiv our paper “Random matrices have simple spectrum“. Recall that an Hermitian matrix is said to have simple eigenvalues if all of its eigenvalues are distinct. This is a very typical property of matrices to have: for instance, as discussed in this previous post, in the space of all Hermitian matrices, the space of matrices without all eigenvalues simple has codimension three, and for real symmetric cases this space has codimension two. In particular, given any random matrix ensemble of Hermitian or real symmetric matrices with an absolutely continuous distribution, we conclude that random matrices drawn from this ensemble will almost surely have simple eigenvalues.

For discrete random matrix ensembles, though, the above argument breaks down, even though general universality heuristics predict that the statistics of discrete ensembles should behave similarly to those of continuous ensembles. A model case here is the adjacency matrix of an Erdös-Rényi graph – a graph on vertices in which any pair of vertices has an independent probability of being in the graph. For the purposes of this paper one should view as fixed, e.g. , while is an asymptotic parameter going to infinity. In this context, our main result is the following (answering a question of Babai):

Theorem 1 With probability , has simple eigenvalues.

Our argument works for more general Wigner-type matrix ensembles, but for sake of illustration we will stick with the Erdös-Renyi case. Previous work on local universality for such matrix models (e.g. the work of Erdos, Knowles, Yau, and Yin) was able to show that any individual eigenvalue gap did not vanish with probability (in fact for some absolute constant ), but because there are different gaps that one has to simultaneously ensure to be non-zero, this did not give Theorem 1 as one is forced to apply the union bound.

Our argument in fact gives simplicity of the spectrum with probability for any fixed ; in a subsequent paper we also show that it gives a quantitative lower bound on the eigenvalue gaps (analogous to how many results on the singularity probability of random matrices can be upgraded to a bound on the least singular value).

The basic idea of argument can be sketched as follows. Suppose that has a repeated eigenvalue . We split

for a random minor and a random sign vector ; crucially, and are independent. If has a repeated eigenvalue , then by the Cauchy interlacing law, also has an eigenvalue . We now write down the eigenvector equation for at :

Extracting the top coefficients, we obtain

If we let be the -eigenvector of , then by taking inner products with we conclude that

we typically expect to be non-zero, in which case we arrive at

In other words, in order for to have a repeated eigenvalue, the top right column of has to be orthogonal to an eigenvector of the minor . Note that and are going to be independent (once we specify which eigenvector of to take as ). On the other hand, thanks to inverse Littlewood-Offord theory (specifically, we use an inverse Littlewood-Offord theorem of Nguyen and Vu), we know that the vector is unlikely to be orthogonal to any given vector independent of , unless the coefficients of are extremely special (specifically, that most of them lie in a generalised arithmetic progression). The main remaining difficulty is then to show that eigenvectors of a random matrix are typically not of this special form, and this relies on a conditioning argument originally used by Komlós to bound the singularity probability of a random sign matrix. (Basically, if an eigenvector has this special form, then one can use a fraction of the rows and columns of the random matrix to determine the eigenvector completely, while still preserving enough randomness in the remaining portion of the matrix so that this vector will in fact not be an eigenvector with high probability.)

A Banach algebra proof of the prime number theorem

The prime number theorem can be expressed as the assertion

as , where

is the von Mangoldt function. It is a basic result in analytic number theory, but requires a bit of effort to prove. One “elementary” proof of this theorem proceeds through the Selberg symmetry formula

where the second von Mangoldt function is defined by the formula

or equivalently

(We are avoiding the use of the symbol here to denote Dirichlet convolution, as we will need this symbol to denote ordinary convolution shortly.) For the convenience of the reader, we give a proof of the Selberg symmetry formula below the fold. Actually, for the purposes of proving the prime number theorem, the weaker estimate

suffices.

In this post I would like to record a somewhat “soft analysis” reformulation of the elementary proof of the prime number theorem in terms of Banach algebras, and specifically in Banach algebra structures on (completions of) the space of compactly supported continuous functions equipped with the convolution operation

This soft argument does not easily give any quantitative decay rate in the prime number theorem, but by the same token it avoids many of the quantitative calculations in the traditional proofs of this theorem. Ultimately, the key “soft analysis” fact used is the spectral radius formula

for any element of a unital commutative Banach algebra , where is the space of characters (i.e., continuous unital algebra homomorphisms from to ) of . This formula is due to Gelfand and may be found in any text on Banach algebras; for sake of completeness we prove it below the fold.

The connection between prime numbers and Banach algebras is given by the following consequence of the Selberg symmetry formula.

Theorem 1 (Construction of a Banach algebra norm) For any , let denote the quantity

Then is a seminorm on with the bound

for all . Furthermore, we have the Banach algebra bound

for all .

We prove this theorem below the fold. The prime number theorem then follows from Theorem 1 and the following two assertions. The first is an application of the spectral radius formula (6) and some basic Fourier analysis (in particular, the observation that contains a plentiful supply of local units):

Theorem 2 (Non-trivial Banach algebras with many local units have non-trivial spectrum) Let be a seminorm on obeying (7), (8). Suppose that is not identically zero. Then there exists such that

for all . In particular, by (7), one has

whenever is a non-negative function.

The second is a consequence of the Selberg symmetry formula and the fact that is real (as well as Mertens’ theorem, in the case), and is closely related to the non-vanishing of the Riemann zeta function on the line :

Theorem 3 (Breaking the parity barrier) Let . Then there exists such that is non-negative, and

Assuming Theorems 1, 2, 3, we may now quickly establish the prime number theorem as follows. Theorem 2 and Theorem 3 imply that the seminorm constructed in Theorem 1 is trivial, and thus

as for any Schwartz function (the decay rate in may depend on ). Specialising to functions of the form for some smooth compactly supported on , we conclude that

as ; by the smooth Urysohn lemma this implies that

as for any fixed , and the prime number theorem then follows by a telescoping series argument.

The same argument also yields the prime number theorem in arithmetic progressions, or equivalently that

for any fixed Dirichlet character ; the one difference is that the use of Mertens’ theorem is replaced by the basic fact that the quantity is non-vanishing.

Real analysis relative to a finite measure space

In the traditional foundations of probability theory, one selects a probability space , and makes a distinction between deterministic mathematical objects, which do not depend on the sampled state , and stochastic (or random) mathematical objects, which do depend (but in a measurable fashion) on the sampled state . For instance, a deterministic real number would just be an element , whereas a stochastic real number (or real random variable) would be a measurable function , where in this post will always be endowed with the Borel -algebra. (For readers familiar with nonstandard analysis, the adjectives “deterministic” and “stochastic” will be used here in a manner analogous to the uses of the adjectives “standard” and “nonstandard” in nonstandard analysis. The analogy is particularly close when comparing with the “cheap nonstandard analysis” discussed in this previous blog post. We will also use “relative to ” as a synonym for “stochastic”.)

Actually, for our purposes we will adopt the philosophy of identifying stochastic objects that agree almost surely, so if one was to be completely precise, we should define a stochastic real number to be an equivalence class of measurable functions , up to almost sure equivalence. However, we shall often abuse notation and write simply as .

More generally, given any measurable space , we can talk either about deterministic elements , or about stochastic elements of , that is to say equivalence classes of measurable maps up to almost sure equivalence. We will use to denote the set of all stochastic elements of . (For readers familiar with sheaves, it may helpful for the purposes of this post to think of as the space of measurable global sections of the trivial –bundle over .) Of course every deterministic element of can also be viewed as a stochastic element given by (the equivalence class of) the constant function , thus giving an embedding of into . We do not attempt here to give an interpretation of for sets that are not equipped with a -algebra .

Remark 1 In my previous post on the foundations of probability theory, I emphasised the freedom to extend the sample space to a larger sample space whenever one wished to inject additional sources of randomness. This is of course an important freedom to possess (and in the current formalism, is the analogue of the important operation of base change in algebraic geometry), but in this post we will focus on a single fixed sample space , and not consider extensions of this space, so that one only has to consider two types of mathematical objects (deterministic and stochastic), as opposed to having many more such types, one for each potential choice of sample space (with the deterministic objects corresponding to the case when the sample space collapses to a point).

Any (measurable) -ary operation on deterministic mathematical objects then extends to their stochastic counterparts by applying the operation pointwise. For instance, the addition operation on deterministic real numbers extends to an addition operation , by defining the class for to be the equivalence class of the function ; this operation is easily seen to be well-defined. More generally, any measurable -ary deterministic operation between measurable spaces extends to an stochastic operation in the obvious manner.

There is a similar story for -ary relations , although here one has to make a distinction between a deterministic reading of the relation and a stochastic one. Namely, if we are given stochastic objects for , the relation does not necessarily take values in the deterministic Boolean algebra , but only in the stochastic Boolean algebra – thus may be true with some positive probability and also false with some positive probability (with the event that being stochastically true being determined up to null events). Of course, the deterministic Boolean algebra embeds in the stochastic one, so we can talk about a relation being determinstically true or deterministically false, which (due to our identification of stochastic objects that agree almost surely) means that is almost surely true or almost surely false respectively. For instance given two stochastic objects , one can view their equality relation as having a stochastic truth value. This is distinct from the way the equality symbol is used in mathematical logic, which we will now call “equality in the deterministic sense” to reduce confusion. Thus, in the deterministic sense if and only if the stochastic truth value of is equal to , that is to say that for almost all .

Any universal identity for deterministic operations (or universal implication between identities) extends to their stochastic counterparts: for instance, addition is commutative, associative, and cancellative on the space of deterministic reals , and is therefore commutative, associative, and cancellative on stochastic reals as well. However, one has to be more careful when working with mathematical laws that are not expressible as universal identities, or implications between identities. For instance, is an integral domain: if are deterministic reals such that , then one must have or . However, if are stochastic reals such that (in the deterministic sense), then it is no longer necessarily the case that (in the deterministic sense) or that (in the deterministic sense); however, it is still true that “ or ” is true in the deterministic sense if one interprets the boolean operator “or” stochastically, thus “ or ” is true for almost all . Another way to properly obtain a stochastic interpretation of the integral domain property of is to rewrite it as

and then make all sets stochastic to obtain the true statement

thus we have to allow the index for which vanishing occurs to also be stochastic, rather than deterministic. (A technical note: when one proves this statement, one has to select in a measurable fashion; for instance, one can choose to equal when , and otherwise (so that in the “tie-breaking” case when and both vanish, one always selects to equal ).)

Similarly, the law of the excluded middle fails when interpreted deterministically, but remains true when interpreted stochastically: if is a stochastic statement, then it is not necessarily the case that is either deterministically true or deterministically false; however the sentence “ or not-” is still deterministically true if the boolean operator “or” is interpreted stochastically rather than deterministically.

To avoid having to keep pointing out which operations are interpreted stochastically and which ones are interpreted deterministically, we will use the following convention: if we assert that a mathematical sentence involving stochastic objects is true, then (unless otherwise specified) we mean that is deterministically true, assuming that all relations used inside are interpreted stochastically. For instance, if are stochastic reals, when we assert that “Exactly one of , , or is true”, then by default it is understood that the relations , , and the boolean operator “exactly one of” are interpreted stochastically, and the assertion is that the sentence is deterministically true.

In the above discussion, the stochastic objects being considered were elements of a deterministic space , such as the reals . However, it can often be convenient to generalise this situation by allowing the ambient space to also be stochastic. For instance, one might wish to consider a stochastic vector inside a stochastic vector space , or a stochastic edge of a stochastic graph . In order to formally describe this situation within the classical framework of measure theory, one needs to place all the ambient spaces inside a measurable space. This can certainly be done in many contexts (e.g. when considering random graphs on a deterministic set of vertices, or if one is willing to work up to equivalence and place the ambient spaces inside a suitable moduli space), but is not completely natural in other contexts. For instance, if one wishes to consider stochastic vector spaces of potentially unbounded dimension (in particular, potentially larger than any given cardinal that one might specify in advance), then the class of all possible vector spaces is so large that it becomes a proper class rather than a set (even if one works up to equivalence), making it problematic to give this class the structure of a measurable space; furthermore, even once one does so, one needs to take additional care to pin down what it would mean for a random vector lying in a random vector space to depend “measurably” on .

Of course, in any reasonable application one can avoid the set theoretic issues at least by various ad hoc means, for instance by restricting the dimension of all spaces involved to some fixed cardinal such as . However, the measure-theoretic issues can require some additional effort to resolve properly.

In this post I would like to describe a different way to formalise stochastic spaces, and stochastic elements of these spaces, by viewing the spaces as measure-theoretic analogue of a sheaf, but being over the probability space rather than over a topological space; stochastic objects are then sections of such sheaves. Actually, for minor technical reasons it is convenient to work in the slightly more general setting in which the base space is a finite measure space rather than a probability space, thus can take any value in rather than being normalised to equal . This will allow us to easily localise to subevents of without the need for normalisation, even when is a null event (though we caution that the map from deterministic objects ceases to be injective in this latter case). We will however still continue to use probabilistic terminology. despite the lack of normalisation; thus for instance, sets in will be referred to as events, the measure of such a set will be referred to as the probability (which is now permitted to exceed in some cases), and an event whose complement is a null event shall be said to hold almost surely. It is in fact likely that almost all of the theory below extends to base spaces which are -finite rather than finite (for instance, by damping the measure to become finite, without introducing any further null events), although we will not pursue this further generalisation here.

The approach taken in this post is “topos-theoretic” in nature (although we will not use the language of topoi explicitly here), and is well suited to a “pointless” or “point-free” approach to probability theory, in which the role of the stochastic state is suppressed as much as possible; instead, one strives to always adopt a “relative point of view”, with all objects under consideration being viewed as stochastic objects relative to the underlying base space . In this perspective, the stochastic version of a set is as follows.

Definition 1 (Stochastic set) Unless otherwise specified, we assume that we are given a fixed finite measure space (which we refer to as the base space). A stochastic set (relative to ) is a tuple consisting of the following objects:

• A set assigned to each event ; and
• A restriction map from to to each pair of nested events . (Strictly speaking, one should indicate the dependence on in the notation for the restriction map, e.g. using instead of , but we will abuse notation by omitting the dependence.)

We refer to elements of as local stochastic elements of the stochastic set , localised to the event , and elements of as global stochastic elements (or simply elements) of the stochastic set. (In the language of sheaves, one would use “sections” instead of “elements” here, but I prefer to use the latter terminology here, for compatibility with conventional probabilistic notation, where for instance measurable maps from to are referred to as real random variables, rather than sections of the reals.)

Furthermore, we impose the following axioms:

• (Category) The map from to is the identity map, and if are events in , then for all .
• (Null events trivial) If is a null event, then the set is a singleton set. (In particular, is always a singleton set; this is analogous to the convention that for any number .)
• (Countable gluing) Suppose that for each natural number , one has an event and an element such that for all . Then there exists a unique such that for all .

If is an event in , we define the localisation of the stochastic set to to be the stochastic set

relative to . (Note that there is no need to renormalise the measure on , as we are not demanding that our base space have total measure .)

The following fact is useful for actually verifying that a given object indeed has the structure of a stochastic set:

Exercise 1 Show that to verify the countable gluing axiom of a stochastic set, it suffices to do so under the additional hypothesis that the events are disjoint. (Note that this is quite different from the situation with sheaves over a topological space, in which the analogous gluing axiom is often trivial in the disjoint case but has non-trivial content in the overlapping case. This is ultimately because a -algebra is closed under all Boolean operations, whereas a topology is only closed under union and intersection.)

Let us illustrate the concept of a stochastic set with some examples.

Example 1 (Discrete case) A simple case arises when is a discrete space which is at most countable. If we assign a set to each , with a singleton if . One then sets , with the obvious restriction maps, giving rise to a stochastic set . (Thus, a local element of can be viewed as a map on that takes values in for each .) Conversely, it is not difficult to see that any stochastic set over an at most countable discrete probability space is of this form up to isomorphism. In this case, one can think of as a bundle of sets over each point (of positive probability) in the base space . One can extend this bundle interpretation of stochastic sets to reasonably nice sample spaces (such as standard Borel spaces) and similarly reasonable ; however, I would like to avoid this interpretation in the formalism below in order to be able to easily work in settings in which and are very “large” (e.g. not separable in any reasonable sense). Note that we permit some of the to be empty, thus it can be possible for to be empty whilst for some strict subevents of to be non-empty. (This is analogous to how it is possible for a sheaf to have local sections but no global sections.) As such, the space of global elements does not completely determine the stochastic set ; one sometimes needs to localise to an event in order to see the full structure of such a set. Thus it is important to distinguish between a stochastic set and its space of global elements. (As such, it is a slight abuse of the axiom of extensionality to refer to global elements of simply as “elements”, but hopefully this should not cause too much confusion.)

Example 2 (Measurable spaces as stochastic sets) Returning now to a general base space , any (deterministic) measurable space gives rise to a stochastic set , with being defined as in previous discussion as the measurable functions from to modulo almost everywhere equivalence (in particular, a singleton set when is null), with the usual restriction maps. The constraint of measurability on the maps , together with the quotienting by almost sure equivalence, means that is now more complicated than a plain Cartesian product of fibres, but this still serves as a useful first approximation to what is for the purposes of developing intuition. Indeed, the measurability constraint is so weak (as compared for instance to topological or smooth constraints in other contexts, such as sheaves of continuous or smooth sections of bundles) that the intuition of essentially independent fibres is quite an accurate one, at least if one avoids consideration of an uncountable number of objects simultaneously.

Example 3 (Extended Hilbert modules) This example is the one that motivated this post for me. Suppose that one has an extension of the base space , thus we have a measurable factor map such that the pushforward of the measure by is equal to . Then we have a conditional expectation operator , defined as the adjoint of the pullback map . As is well known, the conditional expectation operator also extends to a contraction ; by monotone convergence we may also extend to a map from measurable functions from to the extended non-negative reals , to measurable functions from to . We then define the “extended Hilbert module” to be the space of functions with finite almost everywhere. This is an extended version of the Hilbert module , which is defined similarly except that is required to lie in ; this is a Hilbert module over which is of particular importance in the Furstenberg-Zimmer structure theory of measure-preserving systems. We can then define the stochastic set by setting

with the obvious restriction maps. In the case that are standard Borel spaces, one can disintegrate as an integral of probability measures (supported in the fibre ), in which case this stochastic set can be viewed as having fibres (though if is not discrete, there are still some measurability conditions in on the local and global elements that need to be imposed). However, I am interested in the case when are not standard Borel spaces (in fact, I will take them to be algebraic probability spaces, as defined in this previous post), in which case disintegrations are not available. However, it appears that the stochastic analysis developed in this blog post can serve as a substitute for the tool of disintegration in this context.

We make the remark that if is a stochastic set and are events that are equivalent up to null events, then one can identify with (through their common restriction to , with the restriction maps now being bijections). As such, the notion of a stochastic set does not require the full structure of a concrete probability space ; one could also have defined the notion using only the abstract -algebra consisting of modulo null events as the base space, or equivalently one could define stochastic sets over the algebraic probability spaces defined in this previous post. However, we will stick with the classical formalism of concrete probability spaces here so as to keep the notation reasonably familiar.

As a corollary of the above observation, we see that if the base space has total measure , then all stochastic sets are trivial (they are just points).

Exercise 2 If is a stochastic set, show that there exists an event with the property that for any event , is non-empty if and only if is contained in modulo null events. (In particular, is unique up to null events.) Hint: consider the numbers for ranging over all events with non-empty, and form a maximising sequence for these numbers. Then use all three axioms of a stochastic set.

One can now start take many of the fundamental objects, operations, and results in set theory (and, hence, in most other categories of mathematics) and establish analogues relative to a finite measure space. Implicitly, what we will be doing in the next few paragraphs is endowing the category of stochastic sets with the structure of an elementary topos. However, to keep things reasonably concrete, we will not explicitly emphasise the topos-theoretic formalism here, although it is certainly lurking in the background.

Firstly, we define a stochastic function between two stochastic sets to be a collection of maps for each which form a natural transformation in the sense that for all and nested events . In the case when is discrete and at most countable (and after deleting all null points), a stochastic function is nothing more than a collection of functions for each , with the function then being a direct sum of the factor functions :

Thus (in the discrete, at most countable setting, at least) stochastic functions do not mix together information from different states in a sample space; the value of at depends only on the value of at . The situation is a bit more subtle for continuous probability spaces, due to the identification of stochastic objects that agree almost surely, nevertheness it is still good intuition to think of stochastic functions as essentially being “pointwise” or “local” in nature.

One can now form the stochastic set of functions from to , by setting for any event to be the set of local stochastic functions of the localisations of to ; this is a stochastic set if we use the obvious restriction maps. In the case when is discrete and at most countable, the fibre at a point of positive measure is simply the set of functions from to .

In a similar spirit, we say that one stochastic set is a (stochastic) subset of another , and write , if we have a stochastic inclusion map, thus for all events , with the restriction maps being compatible. We can then define the power set of a stochastic set by setting for any event to be the set of all stochastic subsets of relative to ; it is easy to see that is a stochastic set with the obvious restriction maps (one can also identify with in the obvious fashion). Again, when is discrete and at most countable, the fibre of at a point of positive measure is simply the deterministic power set .

Note that if is a stochastic function and is a stochastic subset of , then the inverse image , defined by setting for any event to be the set of those with , is a stochastic subset of . In particular, given a -ary relation , the inverse image is a stochastic subset of , which by abuse of notation we denote as

In a similar spirit, if is a stochastic subset of and is a stochastic function, we can define the image by setting to be the set of those with ; one easily verifies that this is a stochastic subset of .

Remark 2 One should caution that in the definition of the subset relation , it is important that for all events , not just the global event ; in particular, just because a stochastic set has no global sections, does not mean that it is contained in the stochastic empty set .

Now we discuss Boolean operations on stochastic subsets of a given stochastic set . Given two stochastic subsets of , the stochastic intersection is defined by setting to be the set of that lie in both and :

This is easily verified to again be a stochastic subset of . More generally one may define stochastic countable intersections for any sequence of stochastic subsets of . One could extend this definition to uncountable families if one wished, but I would advise against it, because some of the usual laws of Boolean algebra (e.g. the de Morgan laws) may break down in this setting.

Stochastic unions are a bit more subtle. The set should not be defined to simply be the union of and , as this would not respect the gluing axiom. Instead, we define to be the set of all such that one can cover by measurable subevents such that for ; then may be verified to be a stochastic subset of . Thus for instance is the stochastic union of and . Similarly for countable unions of stochastic subsets of , although for uncountable unions are extremely problematic (they are disliked by both the measure theory and the countable gluing axiom) and will not be defined here. Finally, the stochastic difference set is defined as the set of all in such that for any subevent of of positive probability. One may verify that in the case when is discrete and at most countable, these Boolean operations correspond to the classical Boolean operations applied separately to each fibre of the relevant sets . We also leave as an exercise to the reader to verify the usual laws of Boolean arithmetic, e.g. the de Morgan laws, provided that one works with at most countable unions and intersections.

One can also consider a stochastic finite union in which the number of sets in the union is itself stochastic. More precisely, let be a stochastic set, let be a stochastic natural number, and let be a stochastic function from the stochastic set (defined by setting )) to the stochastic power set . Here we are considering to be a natural number, to allow for unions that are possibly empty, with used for the positive natural numbers. We also write for the stochastic function . Then we can define the stochastic union by setting for an event to be the set of local elements with the property that there exists a covering of by measurable subevents for , such that one has and . One can verify that is a stochastic set (with the obvious restriction maps). Again, in the model case when is discrete and at most countable, the fibre is what one would expect it to be, namely .

The Cartesian product of two stochastic sets may be defined by setting for all events , with the obvious restriction maps; this is easily seen to be another stochastic set. This lets one define the concept of a -ary operation from stochastic sets to another stochastic set , or a -ary relation . In particular, given for , the relation may be deterministically true, deterministically false, or have some other stochastic truth value.

Remark 3 In the degenerate case when is null, stochastic logic becomes a bit weird: all stochastic statements are deterministically true, as are their stochastic negations, since every event in (even the empty set) now holds with full probability. Among other pathologies, the empty set now has a global element over (this is analogous to the notorious convention ), and any two deterministic objects become equal over : .

The following simple observation is crucial to subsequent discussion. If is a sequence taking values in the global elements of a stochastic space , then we may also define global elements for stochastic indices as well, by appealing to the countable gluing axiom to glue together restricted to the set for each deterministic natural number to form . With this definition, the map is a stochastic function from to ; indeed, this creates a one-to-one correspondence between external sequences (maps from to ) and stochastic sequences (stochastic functions from to ). Similarly with replaced by any other at most countable set. This observation will be important in allowing many deterministic arguments involving sequences will be able to be carried over to the stochastic setting.

We now specialise from the extremely broad discipline of set theory to the more focused discipline of real analysis. There are two fundamental axioms that underlie real analysis (and in particular distinguishes it from real algebra). The first is the Archimedean property, which we phrase in the “no infinitesimal” formulation as follows:

Proposition 2 (Archimedean property) Let be such that for all positive natural numbers . Then .

The other is the least upper bound axiom:

Proposition 3 (Least upper bound axiom) Let be a non-empty subset of which has an upper bound , thus for all . Then there exists a unique real number with the following properties:

• for all .
• For any real , there exists such that .
• .

Furthermore, does not depend on the choice of .

The Archimedean property extends easily to the stochastic setting:

Proposition 4 (Stochastic Archimedean property) Let be such that for all deterministic natural numbers . Then .

Remark 4 Here, incidentally, is one place in which this stochastic formalism deviates from the nonstandard analysis formalism, as the latter certainly permits the existence of infinitesimal elements. On the other hand, we caution that stochastic real numbers are permitted to be unbounded, so that formulation of Archimedean property is not valid in the stochastic setting.

The proof is easy and is left to the reader. The least upper bound axiom also extends nicely to the stochastic setting, but the proof requires more work (in particular, our argument uses the monotone convergence theorem):

Theorem 5 (Stochastic least upper bound axiom) Let be a stochastic subset of which has a global upper bound , thus for all , and is globally non-empty in the sense that there is at least one global element . Then there exists a unique stochastic real number with the following properties:

• for all .
• For any stochastic real , there exists such that .
• .

Furthermore, does not depend on the choice of .

For future reference, we note that the same result holds with replaced by throughout, since the latter may be embedded in the former, for instance by mapping to and to . In applications, the above theorem serves as a reasonable substitute for the countable axiom of choice, which does not appear to hold in unrestricted generality relative to a measure space; in particular, it can be used to generate various extremising sequences for stochastic functionals on various stochastic function spaces.

Proof: Uniqueness is clear (using the Archimedean property), as well as the independence on , so we turn to existence. By using an order-preserving map from to (e.g. ) we may assume that is a subset of , and that .

We observe that is a lattice: if , then and also lie in . Indeed, may be formed by appealing to the countable gluing axiom to glue (restricted the set ) with (restricted to the set ), and similarly for . (Here we use the fact that relations such as are Borel measurable on .)

Let denote the deterministic quantity

then (by Proposition 3!) is well-defined; here we use the hypothesis that is finite. Thus we may find a sequence of elements of such that

Using the lattice property, we may assume that the are non-decreasing: whenever . If we then define (after choosing measurable representatives of each equivalence class ), then is a stochastic real with .

If , then , and so

From this and (1) we conclude that

From monotone convergence, we conclude that

and so , as required.

Now let be a stochastic real. After choosing measurable representatives of each relevant equivalence class, we see that for almost every , we can find a natural number with . If we choose to be the first such positive natural number when it exists, and (say) otherwise, then is a stochastic positive natural number and . The claim follows.

Remark 5 One can abstract away the role of the measure here, leaving only the ideal of null sets. The property that the measure is finite is then replaced by the more general property that given any non-empty family of measurable sets, there is an at most countable union of sets in that family that is an upper bound modulo null sets for all elements in that faily.

Using Proposition 4 and Theorem 5, one can then revisit many of the other foundational results of deterministic real analysis, and develop stochastic analogues; we give some examples of this below the fold (focusing on the Heine-Borel theorem and a case of the spectral theorem). As an application of this formalism, we revisit some of the Furstenberg-Zimmer structural theory of measure-preserving systems, particularly that of relatively compact and relatively weakly mixing systems, and interpret them in this framework, basically as stochastic versions of compact and weakly mixing systems (though with the caveat that the shift map is allowed to act non-trivially on the underlying probability space). As this formalism is “point-free”, in that it avoids explicit use of fibres and disintegrations, it will be well suited for generalising this structure theory to settings in which the underlying probability spaces are not standard Borel, and the underlying groups are uncountable; I hope to discuss such generalisations in future blog posts.

Remark 6 Roughly speaking, stochastic real analysis can be viewed as a restricted subset of classical real analysis in which all operations have to be “measurable” with respect to the base space. In particular, indiscriminate application of the axiom of choice is not permitted, and one should largely restrict oneself to performing countable unions and intersections rather than arbitrary unions or intersections. Presumably one can formalise this intuition with a suitable “countable transfer principle”, but I was not able to formulate a clean and general principle of this sort, instead verifying various assertions about stochastic objects by hand rather than by direct transfer from the deterministic setting. However, it would be desirable to have such a principle, since otherwise one is faced with the tedious task of redoing all the foundations of real analysis (or whatever other base theory of mathematics one is going to be working in) in the stochastic setting by carefully repeating all the arguments.

More generally, topos theory is a good formalism for capturing precisely the informal idea of performing mathematics with certain operations, such as the axiom of choice, the law of the excluded middle, or arbitrary unions and intersections, being somehow “prohibited” or otherwise “restricted”.

Real stable polynomials and the Kadison-Singer problem

One of the basic tools in modern combinatorics is the probabilistic method, introduced by Erdos, in which a deterministic solution to a given problem is shown to exist by constructing a random candidate for a solution, and showing that this candidate solves all the requirements of the problem with positive probability. When the problem requires a real-valued statistic to be suitably large or suitably small, the following trivial observation is often employed:

Proposition 1 (Comparison with mean) Let be a random real-valued variable, whose mean (or first moment) is finite. Then

with positive probability, and

with positive probability.

This proposition is usually applied in conjunction with a computation of the first moment , in which case this version of the probabilistic method becomes an instance of the first moment method. (For comparison with other moment methods, such as the second moment method, exponential moment method, and zeroth moment method, see Chapter 1 of my book with Van Vu. For a general discussion of the probabilistic method, see the book by Alon and Spencer of the same name.)

As a typical example in random matrix theory, if one wanted to understand how small or how large the operator norm of a random matrix could be, one might first try to compute the expected operator norm and then apply Proposition 1; see this previous blog post for examples of this strategy (and related strategies, based on comparing with more tractable expressions such as the moments ). (In this blog post, all matrices are complex-valued.)

Recently, in their proof of the Kadison-Singer conjecture (and also in their earlier paper on Ramanujan graphs), Marcus, Spielman, and Srivastava introduced an striking new variant of the first moment method, suited in particular for controlling the operator norm of a Hermitian positive semi-definite matrix . Such matrices have non-negative real eigenvalues, and so in this case is just the largest eigenvalue of . Traditionally, one tries to control the eigenvalues through averaged statistics such as moments or Stieltjes transforms ; again, see this previous blog post. Here we use as short-hand for , where is the identity matrix. Marcus, Spielman, and Srivastava instead rely on the interpretation of the eigenvalues of as the roots of the characteristic polynomial of , thus

where is the largest real root of a non-zero polynomial . (In our applications, we will only ever apply to polynomials that have at least one real root, but for sake of completeness let us set if has no real roots.)

Prior to the work of Marcus, Spielman, and Srivastava, I think it is safe to say that the conventional wisdom in random matrix theory was that the representation (1) of the operator norm was not particularly useful, due to the highly non-linear nature of both the characteristic polynomial map and the maximum root map . (Although, as pointed out to me by Adam Marcus, some related ideas have occurred in graph theory rather than random matrix theory, for instance in the theory of the matching polynomial of a graph.) For instance, a fact as basic as the triangle inequality is extremely difficult to establish through (1). Nevertheless, it turns out that for certain special types of random matrices (particularly those in which a typical instance of this ensemble has a simple relationship to “adjacent” matrices in this ensemble), the polynomials enjoy an extremely rich structure (in particular, they lie in families of real stable polynomials, and hence enjoy good combinatorial interlacing properties) that can be surprisingly useful. In particular, Marcus, Spielman, and Srivastava established the following nonlinear variant of Proposition 1:

Proposition 2 (Comparison with mean) Let . Let be a random matrix, which is the sum of independent Hermitian rank one matrices , each taking a finite number of values. Then

with positive probability, and

with positive probability.

We prove this proposition below the fold. The hypothesis that each only takes finitely many values is technical and can likely be relaxed substantially, but we will not need to do so here. Despite the superficial similarity with Proposition 1, the proof of Proposition 2 is quite nonlinear; in particular, one needs the interlacing properties of real stable polynomials to proceed. Another key ingredient in the proof is the observation that while the determinant of a matrix generally behaves in a nonlinear fashion on the underlying matrix , it becomes (affine-)linear when one considers rank one perturbations, and so depends in an affine-multilinear fashion on the . More precisely, we have the following deterministic formula, also proven below the fold:

Proposition 3 (Deterministic multilinearisation formula) Let be the sum of deterministic rank one matrices . Then we have

for all , where the mixed characteristic polynomial of any matrices (not necessarily rank one) is given by the formula

Among other things, this formula gives a useful representation of the mean characteristic polynomial :

Corollary 4 (Random multilinearisation formula) Let be the sum of jointly independent rank one matrices . Then we have

for all .

Proof: For fixed , the expression is a polynomial combination of the , while the differential operator is a linear combination of differential operators for . As a consequence, we may expand (3) as a linear combination of terms, each of which is a multilinear combination of for some . Taking expectations of both sides of (2) and using the joint independence of the , we obtain the claim.

In view of Proposition 2, we can now hope to control the operator norm of certain special types of random matrices (and specifically, the sum of independent Hermitian positive semi-definite rank one matrices) by first controlling the mean of the random characteristic polynomial . Pursuing this philosophy, Marcus, Spielman, and Srivastava establish the following result, which they then use to prove the Kadison-Singer conjecture:

Theorem 5 (Marcus-Spielman-Srivastava theorem) Let . Let be jointly independent random vectors in , with each taking a finite number of values. Suppose that we have the normalisation

where we are using the convention that is the identity matrix whenever necessary. Suppose also that we have the smallness condition

for some and all . Then one has

with positive probability.

Note that the upper bound in (5) must be at least (by taking to be deterministic) and also must be at least (by taking the to always have magnitude at least ). Thus the bound in (5) is asymptotically tight both in the regime and in the regime ; the latter regime will be particularly useful for applications to Kadison-Singer. It should also be noted that if one uses more traditional random matrix theory methods (based on tools such as Proposition 1, as well as more sophisticated variants of these tools, such as the concentration of measure results of Rudelson and Ahlswede-Winter), one obtains a bound of with high probability, which is insufficient for the application to the Kadison-Singer problem; see this article of Tropp. Thus, Theorem 5 obtains a sharper bound, at the cost of trading in “high probability” for “positive probability”.

In the paper of Marcus, Spielman and Srivastava, Theorem 5 is used to deduce a conjecture of Weaver, which was already known to imply the Kadison-Singer conjecture; actually, a slight modification of their argument gives the paving conjecture of Kadison and Singer, from which the original Kadison-Singer conjecture may be readily deduced. We give these implications below the fold. (See also this survey article for some background on the Kadison-Singer problem.)

Let us now summarise how Theorem 5 is proven. In the spirit of semi-definite programming, we rephrase the above theorem in terms of the rank one Hermitian positive semi-definite matrices :

Theorem 6 (Marcus-Spielman-Srivastava theorem again) Let be jointly independent random rank one Hermitian positive semi-definite matrices such that the sum has mean

and such that

for some and all . Then one has

with positive probability.

In view of (1) and Proposition 2, this theorem follows from the following control on the mean characteristic polynomial:

Theorem 7 (Control of mean characteristic polynomial) Let be jointly independent random rank one Hermitian positive semi-definite matrices such that the sum has mean

and such that

for some and all . Then one has

This result is proven using the multilinearisation formula (Corollary 4) and some convexity properties of real stable polynomials; we give the proof below the fold.

Thanks to Adam Marcus, Assaf Naor and Sorin Popa for many useful explanations on various aspects of the Kadison-Singer problem.