# Online talk: Rose McCarty

##### Abstract:

The visibility graph of a finite set of points $S$ on a Jordan curve $\mathcal{J}$ has vertex set $S$, and two points in $S$ are adjacent if the (open) segment between them is contained in the interior of $\mathcal{J}$. To obtain a pseudo-visibility graph, we instead start with a pseudolinear drawing of the complete graph with vertex set $S$ on $\mathcal{J}$. We show that any pseudo-visibility graph with clique number $\omega$ is $\left(3\cdot 4^{\omega-1}\right)$-colourable. This talk will also focus on connections between 1) developing efficient algorithms for recognizing these graphs and 2) constructing uniform, rank-$3$ oriented matroids which represent the pseudolinear drawing.

This is joint work with James Davies, Tomasz Krawczyk, and Bartosz Walczak.

# Online talk: Erik Panzer

##### Abstract:

Invariants of combinatorial structures can be very useful tools that capture some specific characteristics, and repackage them in a meaningful way. For example, the famous Tutte polynomial of a matroid or graph tracks the rank statistics of its submatroids, which has many applications, and relations like contraction-deletion establish a very close connection between the algebraic structure of the invariant (e.g. Tutte polynomials) and the actual matroid itself.

I will present an invariant, called the Hepp bound, that associates to a matroid a rational function in many variables (one variable for each element of the matroid). This invariant behaves nicely with respect to duality and 2-sums, and the residues at its poles factorize into the Hepp bounds of sub- and quotient matroids. It can be specialized to Crapo’s beta invariant and it is also related to Derksen’s invariant. The construction is motivated by the tropicalization of Feynman integrals from the quantum field theory of elementary particles physics. In the case of graphs, the Hepp bound therefore obeys further interesting relations that are known for Feynman integrals.

Due to this rich structure, the Hepp bound can be viewed from several distinct perspectives, each making certain properties emerge more directly than others. I will sketch 3 definitions:
1) enumerative – as a certain sum over flags of submatroids,
2) analytic – as an integral,
3) geometric – as a volume of a polytope.