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We prove the complete monotonicity on $${(0, \infty)^{n}}$$ for suitable inverse powers of the spanning-tree polynomials of graphs and, more generally, of the basis generating polynomials of certain classes of matroids. This generalizes a result of Szegő and answers, among other things, a long-standing question of Lewy and Askey concerning the positivity of Taylor coefficients for certain rational functions. Our proofs are based on two ab-initio methods for proving that $${P^{-\beta}}$$ is completely monotone on a convex cone$C$: the determinantal method and the quadratic-form method. These methods are closely connected with harmonic analysis on Euclidean Jordan algebras (or equivalently on symmetric cones). We furthermore have a variety of constructions that, given such polynomials, can create other ones with the same property: among these are algebraic analogues of the matroid operations of deletion, contraction, direct sum, parallel connection, series connection and 2-sum. The complete monotonicity of $${P^{-\beta}}$$ for some $${\beta > 0}$$ can be viewed as a strong quantitative version of the half-plane property (Hurwitz stability) for$P$, and is also related to the Rayleigh property for matroids.

We study Thurston’s Lipschitz and curve metrics, as well as the arc metric on the Teichmüller space of one-hold tori equipped with complete hyperbolic metrics with boundary holonomy of fixed length. We construct natural Lipschitz maps between two surfaces equipped with such hyperbolic metrics that generalize Thurston’s stretch maps and prove the following: (1) On the Teichmüller space of the torus with one boundary component, the Lipschitz and the curve metrics coincide and define a geodesic metric on this space. (2) On the same space, the arc and the curve metrics coincide when the length of the boundary component is ≤4arcsinh(1), but differ when the boundary length is large. We further apply our stretch map generalization to construct novel Thurston geodesics on the Teichmüller spaces of closed hyperbolic surfaces, and use these geodesics to show that the sum-symmetrization of the Thurston metric fails to exhibit Gromov hyperbolicity.

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We consider the solution of the large-scale nonsymmetric algebraic Riccati equation XCX − XD − AX + B = 0, with M ≡ [D,−C;−B,A] ∈ R(n1+n2)×(n1+n2) being a nonsingular M-matrix. In addition, A and D are sparselike, with the products A−1u, A−⊤u, D−1v, and D−⊤v computable in O(n) complexity (with n = max{n1, n2}), for some vectors u and v, and B, C are low ranked. The structure-preserving doubling algorithms (SDA) by Guo, Lin, and Xu [Numer. Math., 103 (2006), pp. 392–412] is adapted, with the appropriate applications of the Sherman–Morrison– Woodbury formula and the sparse-plus-low-rank representations of various iterates. The resulting large-scale doubling algorithm has an O(n) computational complexity and memory requirement per iteration and converges essentially quadratically. A detailed error analysis, on the effects of truncation of iterates with an explicit forward error bound for the approximate solution from the SDA, and some numerical results will be presented.