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This content will become publicly available on February 1, 2026

Title: Blow-up Whitney forms, shadow forms, and Poisson processes
The Whitney forms on a simplex T admit high-order generalizations that have received a great deal of attention in numerical analysis. Less well-known are the shadow forms of Brasselet, Goresky, and MacPherson. These forms generalize the Whitney forms, but have rational coefficients, allowing singularities near the faces of T. Motivated by numerical problems that exhibit these kinds of singularities, we introduce degrees of freedom for the shadow k-forms that are well-suited for finite element implementations. In particular, we show that the degrees of freedom for the shadow forms are given by integration over the k-dimensional faces of the blow-up T̃ of the simplex T. Consequently, we obtain an isomorphism between the cohomology of the complex of shadow forms and the cellular cohomology of T̃, which vanishes except in degree zero. Additionally, we discover a surprising probabilistic interpretation of shadow forms in terms of Poisson processes. This perspective simplifies several proofs and gives a way of computing bases for the shadow forms using a straightforward combinatorial calculation.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2411209 2411208
PAR ID:
10574898
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Publisher / Repository:
Elsevier
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Results in Applied Mathematics
Volume:
25
Issue:
C
ISSN:
2590-0374
Page Range / eLocation ID:
100529
Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
Finite element exterior calculus, Shadow forms, Whitney forms, Blowup, Finite elements, Cohomology
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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