Singular Hodge theory for combinatorial geometries

We introduce the intersection cohomology module of a matroid and prove that it satisfies Poincaré 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.