Braids, posets and orthoschemes

In this article we study the curvature properties of the order complex of a graded poset under a metric that we call the ``orthoscheme metric''. In addition to other results, we characterize which rank 4 posets have CAT(0) orthoscheme complexes and by applying this theorem to standard posets and complexes associated with four-generator Artin groups, we are able to show that the 5-string braid group is the fundamental group of a compact nonpositively curved space.Comment: 33 pages, 16 figure

The 6-strand braid group is CAT(0)

We show that braid groups with at most 6 strands are CAT(0) using the close connection between these groups, the associated non-crossing partition complexes and the embeddability of their diagonal links into spherical buildings of type A. Furthermore, we prove that the orthoscheme complex of any bounded graded modular complemented lattice is CAT(0), giving a partial answer to a conjecture of Brady and McCammond.Comment: 27 pages, 13 figures. To appear in Geometriae Dedicata, the final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10711-015-0138-

Distance-regular graphs

This is a survey of distance-regular graphs. We present an introduction to distance-regular graphs for the reader who is unfamiliar with the subject, and then give an overview of some developments in the area of distance-regular graphs since the monograph 'BCN' [Brouwer, A.E., Cohen, A.M., Neumaier, A., Distance-Regular Graphs, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1989] was written.Comment: 156 page

Eigenstripping, Spectral Decay, and Edge-Expansion on Posets

Fast mixing of random walks on hypergraphs (simplicial complexes) has recently led to myriad breakthroughs throughout theoretical computer science. Many important applications, however, (e.g. to LTCs, 2-2 games) rely on a more general class of underlying structures called posets, and crucially take advantage of non-simplicial structure. These works make it clear that the global expansion properties of posets depend strongly on their underlying architecture (e.g. simplicial, cubical, linear algebraic), but the overall phenomenon remains poorly understood. In this work, we quantify the advantage of different poset architectures in both a spectral and combinatorial sense, highlighting how regularity controls the spectral decay and edge-expansion of corresponding random walks. We show that the spectra of walks on expanding posets (Dikstein, Dinur, Filmus, Harsha APPROX-RANDOM 2018) concentrate in strips around a small number of approximate eigenvalues controlled by the regularity of the underlying poset. This gives a simple condition to identify poset architectures (e.g. the Grassmann) that exhibit strong (even exponential) decay of eigenvalues, versus architectures like hypergraphs whose eigenvalues decay linearly - a crucial distinction in applications to hardness of approximation and agreement testing such as the recent proof of the 2-2 Games Conjecture (Khot, Minzer, Safra FOCS 2018). We show these results lead to a tight characterization of edge-expansion on expanding posets in the ??-regime (generalizing recent work of Bafna, Hopkins, Kaufman, and Lovett (SODA 2022)), and pay special attention to the case of the Grassmann where we show our results are tight for a natural set of sparsifications of the Grassmann graphs. We note for clarity that our results do not recover the characterization of expansion used in the proof of the 2-2 Games Conjecture which relies on ?_? rather than ??-structure

Finite groups acting on homology manifolds

In this paper we study homology manifolds T admitting the action of a finite group preserving the structure of a regular CW-complex on T. The CW-complex is parameterized by a poset and the topological properties of the manifold are translated into a combinatorial setting via the poset. We concentrate on n-manifolds which admit a fairly rigid group of automorphisms transitive on the n-cells of the complex. This allows us to make yet another translation from a combinatorial into a group theoretic setting. We close by using our machinery to construct representations on manifolds of the Monster, the largest sporadic group. Some of these manifolds are of dimension 24, and hence candidates for examples to Hirzebruch's Prize Question in [HBJ], but unfortunately closer inspection shows the A^-genus of these manifolds is 0 rather than 1, so none is a Hirzebruch manifold

Arrangements of Submanifolds and the Tangent Bundle Complement

Drawing parallels with the theory of hyperplane arrangements, we develop the theory of arrangements of submanifolds. Given a smooth, finite dimensional, real manifold $X$ we consider a finite collection \A of locally flat codimension $1$ submanifolds that intersect like hyperplanes. To such an arrangement we associate two posets: the \emph{poset of faces} (or strata) \FA and the \emph{poset of intersections} L(\A). We also associate two topological spaces to \A. First, the complement of the union of submanifolds in $X$ which we call the \emph{set of chambers} and denote by \Ch. Second, the complement of union of tangent bundles of these submanifolds inside $TX$ which we call the \emph{tangent bundle complement} and denote by M(\A). Our aim is to investigate the relationship between combinatorics of the posets and topology of the complements. We generalize the Salvetti complex construction in this setting and also charcterize its connected covers using incidence relations in the face poset. We also demonstrate some calculations of the fundamental group and the cohomology ring. We apply these general results to study arrangements of spheres, projective spaces, tori and pseudohyperplanes. Finally we generalize Zaslavsky\u27s classical result in order to count the number of chambers