Singular Hodge theory for combinatorial geometries

Abstract

We introduce the intersection cohomology module of a matroid and prove that it satisfies Poincar\'e duality, the hard Lefschetz theorem, and the Hodge-Riemann relations. As applications, we obtain proofs of Dowling and Wilson's Top-Heavy conjecture and the nonnegativity of the coefficients of Kazhdan-Lusztig polynomials for all matroids.