360 research outputs found
Algorithmic aspects of immersibility and embeddability
We analyze an algorithmic question about immersion theory: for which ,
, and or is the question of whether an
-dimensional -manifold is immersible in decidable? As a
corollary, we show that the smooth embeddability of an -manifold with
boundary in is undecidable when is even and .Comment: 20 pages, 1 figure. Revised in response to comments by several
referees, no major changes in mathematical conten
Persistence of Zero Sets
We study robust properties of zero sets of continuous maps
. Formally, we analyze the family
of all zero sets of all continuous maps
closer to than in the max-norm. The fundamental geometric property
of is that all its zero sets lie outside of .
We claim that once the space is fixed, is \emph{fully} determined
by an element of a so-called cohomotopy group which---by a recent result---is
computable whenever the dimension of is at most . More explicitly,
the element is a homotopy class of a map from or into a sphere.
By considering all simultaneously, the pointed cohomotopy groups form a
persistence module---a structure leading to the persistence diagrams as in the
case of \emph{persistent homology} or \emph{well groups}. Eventually, we get a
descriptor of persistent robust properties of zero sets that has better
descriptive power (Theorem A) and better computability status (Theorem B) than
the established well diagrams. Moreover, if we endow every point of each zero
set with gradients of the perturbation, the robust description of the zero sets
by elements of cohomotopy groups is in some sense the best possible (Theorem
C)
Generalized Sums over Histories for Quantum Gravity I. Smooth Conifolds
This paper proposes to generalize the histories included in Euclidean
functional integrals from manifolds to a more general set of compact
topological spaces. This new set of spaces, called conifolds, includes
nonmanifold stationary points that arise naturally in a semiclasssical
evaluation of such integrals; additionally, it can be proven that sequences of
approximately Einstein manifolds and sequences of approximately Einstein
conifolds both converge to Einstein conifolds. Consequently, generalized
Euclidean functional integrals based on these conifold histories yield
semiclassical amplitudes for sequences of both manifold and conifold histories
that approach a stationary point of the Einstein action. Therefore sums over
conifold histories provide a useful and self-consistent starting point for
further study of topological effects in quantum gravity. Postscript figures
available via anonymous ftp at black-hole.physics.ubc.ca (137.82.43.40) in file
gen1.ps.Comment: 81pp., plain TeX, To appear in Nucl. Phys.
IST Austria Thesis
The first part of the thesis considers the computational aspects of the homotopy groups πd(X) of a topological space X. It is well known that there is no algorithm to decide whether the fundamental group π1(X) of a given finite simplicial complex X is trivial. On the other hand, there are several algorithms that, given a finite simplicial complex X that is simply connected (i.e., with π1(X) trivial), compute the higher homotopy group πd(X) for any given d ≥ 2.
However, these algorithms come with a caveat: They compute the isomorphism type of πd(X), d ≥ 2 as an abstract finitely generated abelian group given by generators and relations, but they work with very implicit representations of the elements of πd(X). We present an algorithm that, given a simply connected space X, computes πd(X) and represents its elements as simplicial maps from suitable triangulations of the d-sphere Sd to X. For fixed d, the algorithm runs in time exponential in size(X), the number of simplices of X. Moreover, we prove that this is optimal: For every fixed d ≥ 2,
we construct a family of simply connected spaces X such that for any simplicial map representing a generator of πd(X), the size of the triangulation of S d on which the map is defined, is exponential in size(X).
In the second part of the thesis, we prove that the following question is algorithmically undecidable for d < ⌊3(k+1)/2⌋, k ≥ 5 and (k, d) ̸= (5, 7), which covers essentially everything outside the meta-stable range: Given a finite simplicial complex K of dimension k, decide whether there exists a piecewise-linear (i.e., linear on an arbitrarily fine subdivision of K) embedding f : K ↪→ Rd of K into a d-dimensional Euclidean space
Algorithmic aspects of branched coverings
This is the announcement, and the long summary, of a series of articles on
the algorithmic study of Thurston maps. We describe branched coverings of the
sphere in terms of group-theoretical objects called bisets, and develop a
theory of decompositions of bisets.
We introduce a canonical "Levy" decomposition of an arbitrary Thurston map
into homeomorphisms, metrically-expanding maps and maps doubly covered by torus
endomorphisms. The homeomorphisms decompose themselves into finite-order and
pseudo-Anosov maps, and the expanding maps decompose themselves into rational
maps.
As an outcome, we prove that it is decidable when two Thurston maps are
equivalent. We also show that the decompositions above are computable, both in
theory and in practice.Comment: 60-page announcement of 5-part text, to apper in Ann. Fac. Sci.
Toulouse. Minor typos corrected, and major rewrite of section 7.8, which was
studying a different map than claime
On the Expressive Power of 2-Stack Visibly Pushdown Automata
Visibly pushdown automata are input-driven pushdown automata that recognize
some non-regular context-free languages while preserving the nice closure and
decidability properties of finite automata. Visibly pushdown automata with
multiple stacks have been considered recently by La Torre, Madhusudan, and
Parlato, who exploit the concept of visibility further to obtain a rich
automata class that can even express properties beyond the class of
context-free languages. At the same time, their automata are closed under
boolean operations, have a decidable emptiness and inclusion problem, and enjoy
a logical characterization in terms of a monadic second-order logic over words
with an additional nesting structure. These results require a restricted
version of visibly pushdown automata with multiple stacks whose behavior can be
split up into a fixed number of phases. In this paper, we consider 2-stack
visibly pushdown automata (i.e., visibly pushdown automata with two stacks) in
their unrestricted form. We show that they are expressively equivalent to the
existential fragment of monadic second-order logic. Furthermore, it turns out
that monadic second-order quantifier alternation forms an infinite hierarchy
wrt words with multiple nestings. Combining these results, we conclude that
2-stack visibly pushdown automata are not closed under complementation.
Finally, we discuss the expressive power of B\"{u}chi 2-stack visibly pushdown
automata running on infinite (nested) words. Extending the logic by an infinity
quantifier, we can likewise establish equivalence to existential monadic
second-order logic
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