Intersection cohomology of the symmetric reciprocal plane

Abstract

We compute the Kazhdan-Lusztig polynomial of the uniform matroid of rank n-1 on n elements by proving that the i-th coefficient of is equal to the number of ways to choose i non-intersecting chords in an (n-i+1)-gon. We also show that the corresponding intersection cohomology group is isomorphic to the irreducible representation of the symmetric group associated to the partition [n-2i,2,...,2].

10 pages, 1 figure; small errors corrected after publication