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Sylvester–Gallai for Arrangements of Subspaces

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Abstract

In this work we study arrangements of k-dimensional subspaces \(V_1,\ldots ,V_n \subset \mathbb {C}^\ell \). Our main result shows that, if every pair \(V_{a},V_b\) of subspaces is contained in a dependent triple (a triple \(V_{a},V_b,V_c\) contained in a 2k-dimensional space), then the entire arrangement must be contained in a subspace whose dimension depends only on k (and not on n). The theorem holds under the assumption that \(V_a \cap V_b = \{0\}\) for every pair (otherwise it is false). This generalizes the Sylvester–Gallai theorem (or Kelly’s theorem for complex numbers), which proves the \(k=1\) case. Our proof also handles arrangements in which we have many pairs (instead of all) appearing in dependent triples, generalizing the quantitative results of Barak et. al. (Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 110(48):19213–19219, 2013). One of the main ingredients in the proof is a strengthening of a theorem of Barthe (Invent Math 134(2):335–361, 1998) (from the \(k=1\) to \(k>1\) case) proving the existence of a linear map that makes the angles between pairs of subspaces large on average. Such a mapping can be found, unless there is an obstruction in the form of a low dimensional subspace intersecting many of the spaces in the arrangement (in which case one can use a different argument to prove the main theorem).

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Notes

  1. Following the initial publication of this work, it was brought to our attention that Bennet et. al. [2] already proved a high dimensional version of Barthe’s result and, in fact, Theorem 1.4 could also be derived (with some work) from their results.

  2. One important difference is that LCC’s give rise to configurations where each point can repeat more than once.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Patrick Devlin for helpful discussions on strengthening Theorem 1.4 and to Franck Barthe for bringing to our attention the results of [2]. The authors were supported by NSF CAREER award and by the Sloan fellowship.

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Correspondence to Guangda Hu.

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Dvir, Z., Hu, G. Sylvester–Gallai for Arrangements of Subspaces. Discrete Comput Geom 56, 940–965 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00454-016-9781-7

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