The two lives of the Grassmannian (Q6945558)

The Grassmannian over real number fields can be understood both as a projective variety via the Plucker embedding and as an affine variety via matrices of orthogonal projections. In this paper, the authors connect these two different descriptions of the Grassmannian. More precisely, in Theorem 2.1 they show explicitly how the Plücker coordinates correspond to the entries of the projection matrix. Moreover, the authors give a simpler description of the projection matrix by using the cocircuit matrix of the Plücker coordinates.\N\NThey introduce the \textit{squared Grassmannian}, which naturally arises from the observation that the determinant of a principal submatrix of an orthogonal projection is proportional to the square of a Plucker coordinate. They compute fundamental invariants such as the dimension and degree of the squared Grassmannian and provide a determinantal description of its defining ideal. They also discuss applications to determinantal point processes in statistics.\N\NThe authors further introduce the \textit{projection Grassmannian}, which offers an affine-algebraic understanding of the space of orthogonal projection matrices. They investigate its ideal-theoretic structure and compute basic invariants such as dimensions and degrees.