Categorifying the Magnitude of a Graph
Posted by Simon Willerton
Tom Leinster introduced the idea of the magnitude of graphs (first at the Café and then in a paper). I’ve been working with my mathematical brother Richard Hepworth on categorifying this and our paper has just appeared on the arXiv.
Categorifying the magnitude of a graph, Richard Hepworth and Simon Willerton.
The magnitude of a graph can be thought of as an integer power series. For example, consider the Petersen graph.
Its magnitude starts in the following way.
Richard observed that associated to each graph there is a bigraded group , the graph magnitude homology of , that has the graph magnitude as its graded Euler characteristic. So graph magnitude homology categorifies graph magnitude in the same sense that Khovanov homology categorifies the Jones polynomial.
For instance, for the Petersen graph, the ranks of are given in the following table. You can check that the alternating sum of each row gives a coefficient in the above power series.
Many of the properties that Tom proved for the magnitude are shadows of properties of magnitude homology and I’ll describe them here.
The definition
Let’s have a quick look at the definition first: this is a typical piece of homological algebra. For each graph we define a -chain on to be a -tuple of vertices of such that adjacent vertices are distinct: We equip the graph with the path length metric, so each edge has length , and we define the length of a chain to be the length of the path obtained by traversing its vertices: The chain group is defined to be the free abelian group on the set of -chains of length . We define the differential by where Here, as usual, means “omit ”. The graph magnitude is then defined to be the homology of this differential: Unfortunately, I don’t know of any intuitive interpretation of the chain groups.
Functoriality
One standard advantage of this sort of categorification is that it has functoriality where the original invariant did not. We don’t usually have morphisms between numbers or polynomials, but we do have morphisms between groups. In the case here we have the category of graphs with the morphisms sending vertices to vertices with edges either preserved or contracted, and graph magnitude homology gives a functor from that to the category of bigraded groups and homomorphisms.
Categorifying properties of magnitude
Here are some of the properties of magnitude that we can categorify. With the exception of disjoint unions, all of the other categorification results require some decidedly non-trivial homological algebra to prove.
Disjoint unions
Tom showed that magnitude is additive with respect to the disjoint union of graphs: Our categorification of this is the additivity of the magnitude homology:
Products
Tom showed that magnitude is multiplicative with respect to the cartesian product of graphs The categorification of this is a Künneth Theorem which says that there is a non-naturally split, short exact sequence: If either or has torsion-free magnitude homology, then this sequence reduces to an isomorphism Despite quite a bit of computation, we don’t know whether any graphs have torsion in their magnitude homology.
Unions
Tom showed that a form of the inclusion-exclusion formula holds for certain graphs. We need a pile of definitions first.
Definition. A subgraph is called convex if for all .
One way of reading this is that for and in there is a geodesic joining them that lies in .
Definition. Let be a convex subgraph. We say that projects to if for every that can be connected by an edge-path to some vertex of , there is such that for all we have
For instance, a four-cycle graph projects to any edge, whereas a five cycle does not project to an edge.
Definition. A projecting decomposition is a triple consisting of a graph and subgraphs and such that
,
is convex in ,
projects to .
Tom showed that if is a projecting decomposition then Our categorification of this result is that if is a projecting decomposition, then there is a naturally split short exact sequence (which is a form of Mayer-Vietoris sequence) and consequently there is a natural isomorphism
Diagonality
Tom noted many examples of graphs which had magnitude with coefficients which alternate in sign; these examples included complete graphs, complete bipartite graphs, forests and graphs with up to four vertices.
Our categorification of this is that in all of these cases the magnitude homology is supported on the diagonal: we say a graph is diagonal if if . In this case the magnitude is given by and it means in particular that the coefficients of the magnitude alternate in sign.
The join of graphs and is obtained by adding an edge between every vertex of and every vertex of . This is a very drastic operation, for instance the diameter of the resulting join is at most .
Theorem. If and are non-empty graphs then the join is diagonal.
This tells us immediately that complete graphs and complete bipartite graphs are diagonal. Together with the other properties of magnitude homology mentioned above, we recover the alternating magnitude property of all the graphs noted by Leinster, as well as many more.
However, there is one graph that appears to be diagonal, at least up to degree according to our computer calculations but which we can’t prove is diagonal, i.e. it doesn’t follow from the results above. This graph is the icosahedron graph which is the one-skeleton of the icosahedron.
Where next?
There are plenty of questions that you can ask about magnitude homology, a fundamental one is whether there are graphs with the same magnitude but different magnitude homology and a related one is whether you can categorify Tom’s result (conjectured by me and David Speyer) on the magnitude of graphs which differ by certain Whitney twists.
One interesting thing demonstrated here is that magnitude has its tendrils in homological algebra, yet another area of mathematics to add to the list which includes biodiversity, enriched category theory, curvature and Minkowski dimension.
Re: Categorifying the Magnitude of a Graph
Because this works via graph as metric space, so an enriched category, does this give it a different flavour to Tom’s paper where there was talk of the Euler characteristic of (directed) graphs as that of the category it freely generates?
What had been categorified back there? There was poset homology mentioned. Was there ever a homology for categories?