FoCM 2014 conference
Workshop B3 - Continuous Optimization
December 17, 17:00 ~ 17:30 - Room A21
Stable polynomials, matroids, and sums of squares
Cynthia Vinzant
North Carolina State University, United States - vinzant@umich.edu
In 2004, Choe, Oxley, Sokal and Wagner established a tight connection between matroids and multiaffine real stable polynomials. Recently, Br{\"a}nd{\'e}n used this theory and a polynomial coming from the V\'amos matroid to disprove the generalized Lax conjecture. I will discuss the fascinating connections between these fields and how sums of squares can be used to test both for real stability and for determinantal representability of polynomials.