Shapes of polyhedra and triangulations of the sphere

The space of shapes of a polyhedron with given total angles less than 2\pi at each of its n vertices has a Kaehler metric, locally isometric to complex hyperbolic space CH^{n-3}. The metric is not complete: collisions between vertices take place a finite distance from a nonsingular point. The metric completion is a complex hyperbolic cone-manifold. In some interesting special cases, the metric completion is an orbifold. The concrete description of these spaces of shapes gives information about the combinatorial classification of triangulations of the sphere with no more than 6 triangles at a vertex.Comment: 39 pages. Published copy, also available at http://www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/gt/GTMon1/paper25.abs.htm

Intermediate Subfactors with No Extra Structure

If $N \subset P,Q \subset M$ are type II_1 factors with $N' \cap M = C id$ and $[M:N]$ finite we show that restrictions on the standard invariants of the elementary inclusions $N \subset P$, $N \subset Q$, $P \subset M$ and $Q \subset M$ imply drastic restrictions on the indices and angles between the subfactors. In particular we show that if these standard invariants are trivial and the conditional expectations onto $P$ and $Q$ do not commute, then $[M:N]$ is 6 or $6 + 4\sqrt 2$. In the former case $N$ is the fixed point algebra for an outer action of $S_3$ on $M$ and the angle is $\pi/3$, and in the latter case the angle is $cos^{-1}(\sqrt 2-1)$ and an example may be found in the GHJ subfactor family. The techniques of proof rely heavily on planar algebras.Comment: 51 pages, 65 figure

Transforming triangulations on non planar-surfaces

We consider whether any two triangulations of a polygon or a point set on a non-planar surface with a given metric can be transformed into each other by a sequence of edge flips. The answer is negative in general with some remarkable exceptions, such as polygons on the cylinder, and on the flat torus, and certain configurations of points on the cylinder.Comment: 19 pages, 17 figures. This version has been accepted in the SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics. Keywords: Graph of triangulations, triangulations on surfaces, triangulations of polygons, edge fli

Overlap properties of geometric expanders

The {\em overlap number} of a finite $(d+1)$-uniform hypergraph $H$ is defined as the largest constant $c(H)\in (0,1]$ such that no matter how we map the vertices of $H$ into $\R^d$, there is a point covered by at least a $c(H)$-fraction of the simplices induced by the images of its hyperedges. In~\cite{Gro2}, motivated by the search for an analogue of the notion of graph expansion for higher dimensional simplicial complexes, it was asked whether or not there exists a sequence $\{H_n\}_{n=1}^\infty$ of arbitrarily large $(d+1)$-uniform hypergraphs with bounded degree, for which $\inf_{n\ge 1} c(H_n)>0$. Using both random methods and explicit constructions, we answer this question positively by constructing infinite families of $(d+1)$-uniform hypergraphs with bounded degree such that their overlap numbers are bounded from below by a positive constant $c=c(d)$. We also show that, for every $d$, the best value of the constant $c=c(d)$ that can be achieved by such a construction is asymptotically equal to the limit of the overlap numbers of the complete $(d+1)$-uniform hypergraphs with $n$ vertices, as $n\rightarrow\infty$. For the proof of the latter statement, we establish the following geometric partitioning result of independent interest. For any $d$ and any $\epsilon>0$, there exists $K=K(\epsilon,d)\ge d+1$ satisfying the following condition. For any $k\ge K$, for any point $q \in \mathbb{R}^d$ and for any finite Borel measure $\mu$ on $\mathbb{R}^d$ with respect to which every hyperplane has measure $0$, there is a partition $\mathbb{R}^d=A_1 \cup \ldots \cup A_{k}$ into $k$ measurable parts of equal measure such that all but at most an $\epsilon$-fraction of the $(d+1)$-tuples $A_{i_1},\ldots,A_{i_{d+1}}$ have the property that either all simplices with one vertex in each $A_{i_j}$ contain $q$ or none of these simplices contain $q$