Vantage Points and Sign Patterns

Motivated by a possible application in Social Choice, I will discuss a recent work with Defant, Kravitz and Zhu that studies the number of ways to order points in the plane or in higher dimension according to the sum of their (Euclidean) distances from chosen vantage points.

A crucial mathematical tool here is an extension of results of Milnor and Warren about sign patterns of real polynomials, that have been used in the study of several problems in Discrete Mathematics and theoretical Computer Science, to a version that deals with sign patterns of more general functions.

For information about the Richard P. Stanley Seminar in Combinatorics, visit https://math.mit.edu/combin/