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The purpose of this note is to show that the minimal $e$ for which every smooth Fano hypersurface of dimension $n$ contains a free rational curve of degree at most $e$ cannot be bounded by a linear function in $n$ when the base field has positive characteristic. This is done by providing a super-linear bound on the minimal possible degree of a free curve in certain Fermat hypersurfaces., Comment: 4 pages, comments welcome!

We construct singular quartic double fivefolds whose Kuznetsov component admits a crepant categorical resolution of singularities by a twisted Calabi--Yau threefold. We also construct rational specializations of these fivefolds where such a resolution exists without a twist. This confirms an instance of a higher-dimensional version of Kuznetsov's rationality conjecture, and of a noncommutative version of Reid's fantasy on the connectedness of the moduli of Calabi--Yau threefolds., Comment: 21 pages, comments welcome!

For any power $q$ of the positive ground field characteristic, a smooth $q$-bic threefold -- the Fermat threefold of degree $q+1$ for example -- has a smooth surface $S$ of lines which behaves like the Fano surface of a smooth cubic threefold. I develop projective, moduli-theoretic, and degeneration techniques to study the geometry of $S$. Using, in addition, the modular representation theory of the finite unitary group and the geometric theory of filtrations, I compute cohomology of the structure sheaf of $S$ when $q$ is prime., Comment: 47 pages. Comments very welcome!

Learning methods in Banach spaces are often formulated as regularization problems which minimize the sum of a data fidelity term in a Banach norm and a regularization term in another Banach norm. Due to the infinite dimensional nature of the space, solving such regularization problems is challenging. We construct a direct sum space based on the Banach spaces for the data fidelity term and the regularization term, and then recast the objective function as the norm of a suitable quotient space of the direct sum space. In this way, we express the original regularized problem as an unregularized problem on the direct sum space, which is in turn reformulated as a dual optimization problem in the dual space of the direct sum space. The dual problem is to find the maximum of a linear function on a convex polytope, which may be solved by linear programming. A solution of the original problem is then obtained by using related extremal properties of norming functionals from a solution of the dual problem. Numerical experiments are included to demonstrate that the proposed duality approach leads to an implementable numerical method for solving the regularization learning problems.

This work studies optimal polynomial approximants (OPAs) in the classical Hardy spaces on the unit disk, $H^p$ ($1 < p < \infty$). For fixed $f\in H^p$ and $n\in\mathbb{N}$, the OPA of degree $n$ associated to $f$ is the polynomial which minimizes the quantity $\|qf-1\|_p$ over all complex polynomials $q$ of degree less than or equal to $n$. We begin with some examples which illustrate, when $p\neq2$, how the Banach space geometry makes these problems interesting. We then weave through various results concerning limits and roots of these polynomials, including results which show that OPAs can be witnessed as solutions of certain fixed point problems. Finally, using duality arguments, we provide several bounds concerning the error incurred in the OPA approximation., Comment: 28 pages

A $q$-bic hypersurface is a hypersurface in projective space of degree $q+1$, where $q$ is a power of the positive ground field characteristic, whose equation consists of monomials which are products of a $q$-power and a linear power; the Fermat hypersurface is an example. I identify $q$-bics as moduli spaces of isotropic vectors for an intrinsically defined bilinear form, and use this to study their Fano schemes of linear spaces. Amongst other things, I prove that the scheme of $m$-planes in a smooth $(2m+1)$-dimensional $q$-bic hypersurface is an $(m+1)$-dimensional smooth projective variety of general type which admits a purely inseparable covering by a complete intersection; I compute its Betti numbers by relating it to Deligne--Lusztig varieties for the finite unitary group; and I prove that its Albanese variety is purely inseparably isogenous via an Abel--Jacobi map to a certain conjectural intermediate Jacobian of the hypersurface. The case $m = 1$ may be viewed as an analogue of results of Clemens and Griffiths regarding cubic threefolds., Comment: 32 pages, comments very welcome! v2: Results now unconditional, update introduction

This work studies optimal polynomial approximants (OPAs) in the classical Hardy spaces on the unit disk, $H^p$ ($1 < p < \infty$). In particular, we uncover some estimates concerning the OPAs of degree zero and one. It is also shown that if $f \in H^p$ is an inner function, or if $p>2$ is an even integer, then the roots of the nontrivial OPA for $1/f$ are bounded from the origin by a distance depending only on $p$. For $p\neq 2$, these results are made possible by the novel use of a family of inequalities which are derived from a Banach space analogue of the Pythagorean theorem.

A $q$-bic form is a pairing $V \times V \to \mathbf{k}$ that is linear in the second variable and $q$-power Frobenius linear in the first; here, $V$ is a vector space over a field $\mathbf{k}$ containing the finite field on $q^2$ elements. This article develops a geometric theory of $q$-bic forms in the spirit of that of bilinear forms. I find two filtrations intrinsically attached to a $q$-bic form, with which I define a series of numerical invariants. These are used to classify, study automorphism group schemes of, and describe specialization relations in the parameter space of $q$-bic forms., Comment: Comments very welcome! v2: minor edits; v3: update references and introduction

This work explores several aspects of interpolating sequences for $\ell^p_A$, the space of analytic functions on the unit disk with $p$-summable Maclaurin coefficients. Much of this work is communicated through a Carlesonian lens. We investigate various analogues of Gramian matrices, for which we show boundedness conditions are necessary and sufficient for interpolation, including a characterization of universal interpolating sequences in terms of Riesz systems. We also discuss weak separation, giving a characterization of such sequences using a generalization of the pseudohyperbolic metric. Lastly, we consider Carleson measures and embeddings., Comment: 36 pages, 2 figures

Traditional algebraic geometric invariants lose some of their potency in positive characteristic. For instance, smooth projective hypersurfaces may be covered by lines despite being of arbitrarily high degree. The purpose of this dissertation is to define a class of hypersurfaces that exhibits such classically unexpected properties, and to offer a perspective with which to conceptualize such phenomena. Specifically, this dissertation proposes an analogy between the eponymous $q$-bic hypersurfaces -- special hypersurfaces of degree $q+1$, with $q$ any power of the ground field characteristic, a familiar example given by the corresponding Fermat hypersurface -- and low degree hypersurfaces, especially quadrics and cubics. This analogy is substantiated by concrete results such as: $q$-bic hypersurfaces are moduli spaces of isotropic vectors for a bilinear form; the Fano schemes of linear spaces contained in a smooth $q$-bic hypersurface are smooth, irreducible, and carry structures similar to orthogonal Grassmannian; and the intermediate Jacobian of a $q$-bic threefold is purely inseparably isogenous to the Albanese variety of its smooth Fano surface of lines., Comment: 295 pages, PhD thesis, comments welcome!

For $p \in (1,\infty)\setminus \{2\}$, some properties of the space $\mathscr{M}_p$ of multipliers on $\ell^p_A$ are derived. In particular, the failure of the weak parallelogram laws and the Pythagorean inequalities is demonstrated for $\mathscr{M}_p$. It is also shown that the extremal multipliers on the $\ell^p_A$ spaces are exactly the monomials, in stark contrast to the $p=2$ case., Comment: 15 pages

The study of inner and cyclic functions in $\ell^p_A$ spaces requires a better understanding of the zeros of the so-called optimal polynomial approximants. We determine that a point of the complex plane is the zero of an optimal polynomial approximant for some element of $\ell^p_A$ if and only if it lies outside of a closed disk (centered at the origin) of a particular radius which depends on the value of $p$. We find the value of this radius for $p\neq 2$. In addition, for each positive integer $d$ there is a polynomial $f_d$ of degree at most $d$ that minimizes the modulus of the root of its optimal linear polynomial approximant. We develop a method for finding these extremal functions $f_d$ and discuss their properties. The method involves the Lagrange multiplier method and a resulting dynamical system.

We give explicit blowups of the projective plane in positive characteristic that contain smooth rational curves of arbitrarily negative self-intersection, showing that the Bounded Negativity Conjecture fails even for rational surfaces in positive characteristic., Comment: 12 pages

Talek is a private group messaging system that sends messages through potentially untrustworthy servers, while hiding both data content and the communication patterns among its users. Talek explores a new point in the design space of private messaging; it guarantees access sequence indistinguishability, which is among the strongest guarantees in the space, while assuming an anytrust threat model, which is only slightly weaker than the strongest threat model currently found in related work. Our results suggest that this is a pragmatic point in the design space, since it supports strong privacy and good performance: we demonstrate a 3-server Talek cluster that achieves throughput of 9,433 messages/second for 32,000 active users with 1.7-second end-to-end latency. To achieve its security goals without coordination between clients, Talek relies on information-theoretic private information retrieval. To achieve good performance and minimize server-side storage, Talek introduces new techniques and optimizations that may be of independent interest, e.g., a novel use of blocked cuckoo hashing and support for private notifications. The latter provide a private, efficient mechanism for users to learn, without polling, which logs have new messages.

In this paper we survey and bring together several approaches to obtaining inner functions for Toeplitz operators. These approaches include the classical definition, the Wold decomposition, the operator-valued Poisson Integral, and Clark measures. We then extend these notions somewhat to inner functions on model spaces. Along the way we present some novel examples., Comment: 23 pages

Machine learning models benefit from large and diverse datasets. Using such datasets, however, often requires trusting a centralized data aggregator. For sensitive applications like healthcare and finance this is undesirable as it could compromise patient privacy or divulge trade secrets. Recent advances in secure and privacy-preserving computation, including trusted hardware enclaves and differential privacy, offer a way for mutually distrusting parties to efficiently train a machine learning model without revealing the training data. In this work, we introduce Myelin, a deep learning framework which combines these privacy-preservation primitives, and use it to establish a baseline level of performance for fully private machine learning.

In this paper we explore the notion of inner function in a broader context of operator theory.

Smart contracts are applications that execute on blockchains. Today they manage billions of dollars in value and motivate visionary plans for pervasive blockchain deployment. While smart contracts inherit the availability and other security assurances of blockchains, however, they are impeded by blockchains' lack of confidentiality and poor performance. We present Ekiden, a system that addresses these critical gaps by combining blockchains with Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). Ekiden leverages a novel architecture that separates consensus from execution, enabling efficient TEE-backed confidentiality-preserving smart-contracts and high scalability. Our prototype (with Tendermint as the consensus layer) achieves example performance of 600x more throughput and 400x less latency at 1000x less cost than the Ethereum mainnet. Another contribution of this paper is that we systematically identify and treat the pitfalls arising from harmonizing TEEs and blockchains. Treated separately, both TEEs and blockchains provide powerful guarantees, but hybridized, though, they engender new attacks. For example, in naive designs, privacy in TEE-backed contracts can be jeopardized by forgery of blocks, a seemingly unrelated attack vector. We believe the insights learned from Ekiden will prove to be of broad importance in hybridized TEE-blockchain systems.

Inspired by Clarkson's inequalities for $L^p$ and continuing work from \cite{CR}, this paper computes the optimal constant $C$ in the weak parallelogram laws $$ \|f + g \|^r + C\|f - g\|^r \leq 2^{r-1}\big( \|f\|^r + \|g\|^r \big), $$ $$ \|f + g \|^r + C\|f- g \|^r \geq 2^{r-1}\big( \|f\|^r + \|g \|^r \big)$$ for the $L^p$ spaces, $1 < p < \infty$., Comment: 10 pages

In this paper we characterize the zero sets of functions from $\ell^{p}_{A}$ (the analytic functions on the open unit disk $D$ whose Taylor coefficients form an $\ell^p$ sequence) by developing a concept of an "inner function" modeled by Beurling's discussion of the Hilbert space $\ell^{2}_{A}$ (the classical Hardy space). The zero set criterion is used to construct families of zero sets which are not covered by classical results. In particular, it is proved that when $p > 2$, there are zero sets for $\ell^{p}_{A}$ which are not Blaschke sequences., Comment: 28 pages

Let $\Gamma$ be a connected bridgeless metric graph, and fix a point $v$ of $\Gamma$. We define combinatorial iterated integrals on $\Gamma$ along closed paths at $v$, a unipotent generalization of the usual cycle pairing and the combinatorial analogue of Chen's iterated integrals on Riemann surfaces. These descend to a bilinear pairing between the group algebra of the fundamental group of $\Gamma$ at $v$ and the tensor algebra on the first homology of $\Gamma$, $\int\colon \mathbf{Z}\pi_1(\Gamma,v) \times T\mathrm{H}_1(\Gamma,\mathbf{R}) \to \mathbf{R}$. We show that this pairing on the two-step unipotent quotient of the group algebra allows one to recover the base-point $v$ up to well-understood finite ambiguity. We encode the data of this structure as the combinatorial harmonic volume which is valued in the tropical intermediate Jacobian. We also give a potential-theoretic characterization for hyperelliptiicity for graphs., Comment: v3: Completely rewritten with changed title. 20pp. Comments always welcome!

Quasi-triangular Hopf algebras were introduced by Drinfel'd in his construction of solutions to the Yang--Baxter Equation. This algebra is built upon $\mathcal{U}_h(\mathfrak{sl}_2)$, the quantized universal enveloping algebra of the Lie algebra $\mathfrak{sl}_2$. In this paper, combinatorial structure in $\mathcal{U}_h(\mathfrak{sl}_2)$ is elicited, and used to assist in highly intricate calculations in this algebra. To this end, a combinatorial methodology is formulated for straightening algebraic expressions to a canonical form in the case $n=1$. We apply this formalism to the quasi-triangular Hopf algebras and obtain a constructive account not only for the derivation of the Drinfel'd's $R$-matrix, but also for the arguably mysterious ribbon elements of $\mathcal{U}_h(\mathfrak{sl}_2)$. Finally, we extend these techniques to the higher dimensional algebras $\mathcal{U}_h(\mathfrak{sl}_{n+1})$. While these explicit algebraic results are well-known, our contribution is in our formalism and perspective: our emphasis is on the combinatorial structure of these algebras and how that structure may guide algebraic constructions., Comment: 22 pages, comments always welcome!