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I’m happy to announce our new paper Equiangular lines with a fixed angle joint with four MIT coauthors: Zilin Jiang, Jonathan Tidor, Yuan Yao, and Shengtong Zhang.

Zilin is an Instructor (postdoc), Jonathan is my PhD student who just finished his second year, and Yuan and Shengtong are undergraduates who just finished their second and first respective years.

Our paper solves a longstanding problem in discrete geometry concerning equiangular lines, which are configurations of lines in space that are pairwise separated by the same angle. How many such lines can exist simultaneously in a given dimension?

We determine, for every fixed angle, the maximum number of equiangular lines with the given angle in high dimensions.

Our paper builds on a long sequence of earlier ideas. There were some important progress on this problem by Igor Balla, Felix Dräxler, Peter Keevash, and Benny Sudakov, as featured in this earlier Quanta Magazine article written for a lay audience.

In the end we finished off the problem in a clean and crisp manner, in a 10-page paper with a self-contained proof.

It has been known that the study of equiangular lines is closed linked to spectral graph theory, which seeks to understand graphs via their spectrum (i.e., eigenvalues). We prove our main result via a new insight in spectral graph theory, namely that a bounded degree graph must have sublinear second eigenvalue multiplicity.

• Mehtaab Sawhney wins Clay Research Fellowship 1/25/2024
• Papers by MIT combinatorialists—Fall 2023 12/22/2023
• Schildkraut: Equiangular lines and large multiplicity of fixed second eigenvalue 3/6/2023
• Nearly all k-SAT functions are unate 9/19/2022
• Kwan–Sah–Sawhney–Simkin: High-girth Steiner triple systems 1/13/2022
• Graphs with high second eigenvalue multiplicity 9/28/2021
• Enumerating k-SAT functions 7/21/2021
• Mathematical tools for large graphs 7/12/2021
• How I manage my BibTeX references, and why I prefer not initializing first names 7/4/2021
• The cylindrical width of transitive sets 1/28/2021
• Ashwin Sah and Mehtaab Sawhney win the Morgan Prize 10/29/2020
• Jain–Sah–Sawhney: Singularity of discrete random matrices 10/13/2020
• Gunby: Upper tails for random regular graphs 10/5/2020
• Joints of varieties 9/12/2020
• Ashwin Sah's new diagonal Ramsey number upper bound 5/20/2020
• Joints tightened 11/21/2019
• Equiangular lines with a fixed angle 7/30/2019
• Impartial digraphs 6/27/2019
• A reverse Sidorenko inequality 9/26/2018
• The number of independent sets in an irregular graph 5/12/2018