Glick's conjecture on the point of collapse of axis-aligned polygons under the pentagram maps

Abstract

The pentagram map has been studied in a series of papers by Schwartz and others. Schwartz showed that an axis-aligned polygon collapses to a point under a predictable number of iterations of the pentagram map. Glick gave a different proof using cluster algebras, and conjectured that the point of collapse is always the center of mass of the axis-aligned polygon. In this paper, we answer Glick's conjecture positively, and generalize the statement to higher and lower dimensional pentagram maps. For the latter map, we define a new system -- the mirror pentagram map -- and prove a closely related result. In addition, the mirror pentagram map provides a geometric description for the lower dimensional pentagram map, defined algebraically by Gekhtman, Shapiro, Tabachnikov and Vainshtein.