The Category of Matroids

The structure of the category of matroids and strong maps is investigated: it has coproducts and equalizers, but not products or coequalizers; there are functors from the categories of graphs and vector spaces, the latter being faithful; there is a functor to the category of geometric lattices, that is nearly full; there are various adjunctions and free constructions on subcategories, inducing a simplification monad; there are two orthogonal factorization systems; some, but not many, combinatorial constructions from matroid theory are functorial.Comment: 31 pages, 10 diagrams, 28 reference

Cohomology and combinatorics of toric arrangements

This Ph.D. thesis presents my results obtained in the last three years. These results have appeared in the following preprints and articles: [Pag19b, Pag19d, CDD+18, Pag18a, Pag18c, Pag19c, Pag18b, Pag19a, PP19b]. Initially, I investigated toric arrangements, a type of arrangements inspired by the hyperplane ones. Toric arrangements have been studied intensively in the last fifteen years both from topological and from combinatorial point of view. My results describe the cohomology ring of toric arrangements and their dependency from the combinatorial data. Later I have worked on another type of arrangements, i.e. elliptic arrangements, which are tougher than the toric case. I focused on the most regular case, i.e. the braid arrangements, that coincides with the configuration spaces of points in an elliptic curve. I have obtained some results on the unordered configuration space of points in an elliptic curve, and I have generalized some of them to configurations on closed orientable surfaces. Only very recently I have made some conjectures about the cohomology of braid elliptic arrangements

Tensor categorical foundations of algebraic geometry

Tannaka duality and its extensions by Lurie, Sch\"appi et al. reveal that many schemes as well as algebraic stacks may be identified with their tensor categories of quasi-coherent sheaves. In this thesis we study constructions of cocomplete tensor categories (resp. cocontinuous tensor functors) which usually correspond to constructions of schemes (resp. their morphisms) in the case of quasi-coherent sheaves. This means to globalize the usual local-global algebraic geometry. For this we first have to develop basic commutative algebra in an arbitrary cocomplete tensor category. We then discuss tensor categorical globalizations of affine morphisms, projective morphisms, immersions, classical projective embeddings (Segre, Pl\"ucker, Veronese), blow-ups, fiber products, classifying stacks and finally tangent bundles. It turns out that the universal properties of several moduli spaces or stacks translate to the corresponding tensor categories.Comment: PhD thesis; 247 page

Skeleta in non-Archimedean and tropical geometry

I describe an algebro-geometric theory of skeleta, which provides a unified setting for the study of tropical varieties, skeleta of non-Archimedean analytic spaces, and affine manifolds with singularities. Skeleta are spaces equipped with a structure sheaf of topological semirings, and are locally modelled on the spectra of the same. The primary result of this paper is that the topological space X underlying a non-Archimedean analytic space may locally be recovered from the sheaf |∂x| of pointwise valuations' of its analytic functions in other words, (X,|∂x|) is a skeleton.Open Acces

Automorphisms of free products of groups

The symmetric automorphism group of a free product is a group rich in algebraic structure and with strong links to geometric configuration spaces. In this thesis I describe in detail and for the first time the (co)homology of the symmetric automorphism groups. To this end I construct a classifying space for the Fouxe-Rabinovitch automorphism group, a large normal subgroup of the symmetric automorphism group. This classifying space is a moduli space of 'cactus products', each of which has the homotopy type of a wedge product of spaces. To study this space we build a combinatorial theory centred around 'diagonal complexes' which may be of independent interest. The diagonal complex associated to the cactus products consists of the set of forest posets, which in turn characterise the homology of the moduli spaces of cactus products. The machinery of diagonal complexes is then turned towards the symmetric automorphism groups of a graph product of groups. I also show that symmetric automorphisms may be determined by their categorical properties and that they are in particular characteristic of the free product functor. This goes some way to explain their occurence in a range of situations. The final chapter is devoted to a class of configuration spaces of Euclidean n-spheres embedded disjointly in (n+2)-space. When n = 1 this is the configuration space of unknotted, unlinked loops in 3-space, which has been well studied. We continue this work for higher n and find that the fundamental groups remain unchanged. We then consider the homology and the higher homotopy groups of the configuration spaces. Our last contribution is an epilogue which discusses the place of these groups in the wider field of mathematics. It is the functoriality which is important here and using this new-found emphasis we argue that there should exist a generalised version of the material from the final chapter which would apply to a far wider range of configuration spaces

Adelic Geometry via Topos Theory

Our starting point has to do with a key tension running through number theory: although all completions of the rationals Q should be treated symmetrically, this is complicated by fundamental disanalogies between the p-adics vs. the reals. Whereas prior work has typically been guided by classical point-set reasoning, this thesis explores various ways of pulling this problem away from the underlying set theory, revealing various surprises that are obscured by the classical perspective. Framing these investigations is the following test problem: construct and describe the topos of completions of Q (up to equivalence). Chapter 2 begins with the preliminaries: we set up the topos-theoretic framework of point-free topology, with a view towards highlighting the distinction between classical vs. geometric mathematics, before introducing the number-theoretic context. A key theme is that geometric mathematics possesses an intrinsic continuity, which forces us to think more carefully about the topological character of classical algebraic constructions. Chapter 3 represents the first step towards constructing the topos of completions. Here, we provide a pointfree account of real exponentiation and logarithms, which will allow us to define the equivalence of completions geometrically. Chapter 4 provides a geometric proof of Ostrowski's Theorem for both upper-valued abosolute values on Z as well as Dedekind-valued absolute values on Q, along with some key insights about the relationship between the multiplicative seminorms and upper reals. In a slightly more classical interlude, Chapter 5 extends these insights to obtain a surprising generalisation of a foundational result in Berkovich geometry. Namely, by replacing the use of classical rigid discs with formal balls, we obtain a classification of the points of Berkovich Spectra M(K{R^{-1}T}) via the language of filters [more precisely, what we call: R-good filters] even when the base field K is trivially-valued. Returning to geometricity, Chapter 6 builds upon Chapters 3 and 4 to investigate the space of places of Q via descent arguments. Here, we uncover an even deeper surprise. Although the non-Archimedean places correspond to singletons (as is classically expected), the Archimedean place corresponds to the subspace of upper reals in [0, 1], a sort of blurred unit interval. The chapter then analyses the topological differences between the non-Archimedean vs. Archimedean places. In particular, we discover that while the topos corresponding to Archimedean place witnesses non-trivial forking in the connected components of its sheaves, the topos corresponding to the non-Archimedean place eliminates all kinds of forking phenomena. We then conclude with some insights and observations, framed by the question: "How should the connected and the disconnected interact?