This paper further studies the matroid realization space of a specific deformation of the regular n-gon with its lines of symmetry. Recently, we obtained that these particular realization spaces are birational to the elliptic modular surfaces $\Xi _{1}(n)$ over the modular curve $X_1(n)$. Here, we focus on the peculiar cases when $n=7,8$ in more detail. We obtain concrete quartic surfaces in $\mathbb {P}^3$ equipped with a dominant rational self-map stemming from an operator on line arrangements, which yields K3 surfaces with a dynamical system that is semi-conjugated to the plane.

We use the geometry of the stellahedral toric variety to study matroids. We identify the valuative group of matroids with the cohomology ring of the stellahedral toric variety and show that valuative, homological and numerical equivalence relations for matroids coincide. We establish a new log-concavity result for the Tutte polynomial of a matroid, answering a question of Wagner and Shapiro–Smirnov–Vaintrob on Postnikov–Shapiro algebras, and calculate the Chern–Schwartz–MacPherson classes of matroid Schubert cells. The central construction is the ‘augmented tautological classes of matroids’, modeled after certain toric vector bundles on the stellahedral toric variety.

We prove that the moduli space of rational curves with cyclic action, constructed in our previous work, is realizable as a wonderful compactification of the complement of a hyperplane arrangement in a product of projective spaces. By proving a general result on such wonderful compactifications, we conclude that this moduli space is Chow-equivalent to an explicit toric variety (whose fan can be understood as a tropical version of the moduli space), from which a computation of its Chow ring follows.

For each central essential hyperplane arrangement $\mathcal{A}$ over an algebraically closed field, let $Z_\mathcal{A}^{\hat\mu}(T)$ denote the Denef–Loeser motivic zeta function of $\mathcal{A}$ . We prove a formula expressing $Z_\mathcal{A}^{\hat\mu}(T)$ in terms of the Milnor fibers of related hyperplane arrangements. This formula shows that, in a precise sense, the degree to which $Z_{\mathcal{A}}^{\hat\mu}(T)$ fails to be a combinatorial invariant is completely controlled by these Milnor fibers. As one application, we use this formula to show that the map taking each complex arrangement $\mathcal{A}$ to the Hodge–Deligne specialization of $Z_{\mathcal{A}}^{\hat\mu}(T)$ is locally constant on the realization space of any loop-free matroid. We also prove a combinatorial formula expressing the motivic Igusa zeta function of $\mathcal{A}$ in terms of the characteristic polynomials of related arrangements.

We introduce a conjecture on Virasoro constraints for the moduli space of stable sheaves on a smooth projective surface. These generalise the Virasoro constraints on the Hilbert scheme of a surface found by Moreira and Moreira, Oblomkov, Okounkov and Pandharipande. We verify the conjecture in many nontrivial cases by using a combinatorial description of equivariant sheaves found by Klyachko.

In this paper, we study the Koszul property of the homogeneous coordinate ring of a generic collection of lines in $\mathbb {P}^n$ and the homogeneous coordinate ring of a collection of lines in general linear position in $\mathbb {P}^n.$ We show that if $\mathcal {M}$ is a collection of m lines in general linear position in $\mathbb {P}^n$ with $2m \leq n+1$ and R is the coordinate ring of $\mathcal {M},$ then R is Koszul. Furthermore, if $\mathcal {M}$ is a generic collection of m lines in $\mathbb {P}^n$ and R is the coordinate ring of $\mathcal {M}$ with m even and $m +1\leq n$ or m is odd and $m +2\leq n,$ then R is Koszul. Lastly, we show that if $\mathcal {M}$ is a generic collection of m lines such that

$$ \begin{align*} m> \frac{1}{72}\left(3(n^2+10n+13)+\sqrt{3(n-1)^3(3n+5)}\right),\end{align*} $$

$n \leq 6$

$m \leq 6$

We prove that the maximal number of conics in a smooth sextic $K3$ -surface $X\subset \mathbb {P}^4$ is 285, whereas the maximal number of real conics in a real sextic is 261. In both extremal configurations, all conics are irreducible.

Let $W\subset \operatorname{GL}(V)$ be a complex reflection group and $\mathscr{A}(W)$ the set of the mirrors of the complex reflections in $W$. It is known that the complement $X(\mathscr{A}(W))$ of the reflection arrangement $\mathscr{A}(W)$ is a $K(\unicode[STIX]{x1D70B},1)$ space. For $Y$ an intersection of hyperplanes in $\mathscr{A}(W)$, let $X(\mathscr{A}(W)^{Y})$ be the complement in $Y$ of the hyperplanes in $\mathscr{A}(W)$ not containing $Y$. We hope that $X(\mathscr{A}(W)^{Y})$ is always a $K(\unicode[STIX]{x1D70B},1)$. We prove it in case of the monomial groups $W=G(r,p,\ell )$. Using known results, we then show that there remain only three irreducible complex reflection groups, leading to just eight such induced arrangements for which this $K(\unicode[STIX]{x1D70B},1)$ property remains to be proved.

We compute cones of effective cycles on some blowups of projective spaces in general sets of lines.

In this note we prove the following surprising characterization: if $X\,\subset \,{{\mathbb{A}}^{n}}$ is an (embedded, non-empty, proper) algebraic variety deûned over a field $k$ of characteristic zero, then $X$ is a hypersurface if and only if the module ${{T}_{{{O}_{{{\mathbb{A}}^{n\,/k}}}}}}(X)$ of logarithmic vector fields of $X$ is a reflexive ${{O}_{{{\mathbb{A}}^{n}}}}$-module. As a consequence of this result, we derive that if ${{T}_{{{O}_{{{\mathbb{A}}^{n\,/k}}}}}}(X)$ is a free ${{O}_{{{\mathbb{A}}^{n}}}}$-module, which is shown to be equivalent to the freeness of the $t$-th exterior power of ${{T}_{{{O}_{{{\mathbb{A}}^{n\,/k}}}}}}(X)$ for some (in fact, any) $t\,\le \,n$, then necessarily $X$ is a Saito free divisor.

We prove the existence of complexified real arrangements with the same combinatorics but different embeddings in ${\mathbb P}^2$. Such a pair of arrangements has an additional property: they admit conjugated equations on the ring of polynomials over ${\mathbb Q}(\sqrt{5})$.