Group twin coloring of graphs

For a given graph $G$, the least integer $k\geq 2$ such that for every Abelian group $\mathcal{G}$ of order $k$ there exists a proper edge labeling $f:E(G)\rightarrow \mathcal{G}$ so that $\sum_{x\in N(u)}f(xu)\neq \sum_{x\in N(v)}f(xv)$ for each edge $uv\in E(G)$ is called the \textit{group twin chromatic index} of $G$ and denoted by $\chi'_g(G)$. This graph invariant is related to a few well-known problems in the field of neighbor distinguishing graph colorings. We conjecture that $\chi'_g(G)\leq \Delta(G)+3$ for all graphs without isolated edges, where $\Delta(G)$ is the maximum degree of $G$, and provide an infinite family of connected graph (trees) for which the equality holds. We prove that this conjecture is valid for all trees, and then apply this result as the base case for proving a general upper bound for all graphs $G$ without isolated edges: $\chi'_g(G)\leq 2(\Delta(G)+{\rm col}(G))-5$, where ${\rm col}(G)$ denotes the coloring number of $G$. This improves the best known upper bound known previously only for the case of cyclic groups $\mathbb{Z}_k$

The Milnor degree of a three-manifold

The Milnor degree of a 3-manifold is an invariant that records the maximum simplicity, in terms of higher order linking, of any link in the 3-sphere that can be surgered to give the manifold. This invariant is investigated in the context of torsion linking forms, nilpotent quotients of the fundamental group, Massey products and quantum invariants, and the existence of 3-manifolds with any prescribed Milnor degree and first Betti number is established. Along the way, it is shown that the number M(k,r) of linearly independent Milnor invariants of degree k, distinguishing r-component links in the 3-sphere whose lower degree invariants vanish, is positive except in the classically known cases (when r = 1, and when r = 2 with k = 2, 4 or 6).Comment: This version, to appear in Journal of Topology, includes only minor revisions, and added proof of Corollary 1.

Topological Data Analysis of Task-Based fMRI Data from Experiments on Schizophrenia

We use methods from computational algebraic topology to study functional brain networks, in which nodes represent brain regions and weighted edges encode the similarity of fMRI time series from each region. With these tools, which allow one to characterize topological invariants such as loops in high-dimensional data, we are able to gain understanding into low-dimensional structures in networks in a way that complements traditional approaches that are based on pairwise interactions. In the present paper, we use persistent homology to analyze networks that we construct from task-based fMRI data from schizophrenia patients, healthy controls, and healthy siblings of schizophrenia patients. We thereby explore the persistence of topological structures such as loops at different scales in these networks. We use persistence landscapes and persistence images to create output summaries from our persistent-homology calculations, and we study the persistence landscapes and images using $k$-means clustering and community detection. Based on our analysis of persistence landscapes, we find that the members of the sibling cohort have topological features (specifically, their 1-dimensional loops) that are distinct from the other two cohorts. From the persistence images, we are able to distinguish all three subject groups and to determine the brain regions in the loops (with four or more edges) that allow us to make these distinctions

Distinguishing partitions of complete multipartite graphs

A \textit{distinguishing partition} of a group $X$ with automorphism group ${aut}(X)$ is a partition of $X$ that is fixed by no nontrivial element of ${aut}(X)$. In the event that $X$ is a complete multipartite graph with its automorphism group, the existence of a distinguishing partition is equivalent to the existence of an asymmetric hypergraph with prescribed edge sizes. An asymptotic result is proven on the existence of a distinguishing partition when $X$ is a complete multipartite graph with $m_1$ parts of size $n_1$ and $m_2$ parts of size $n_2$ for small $n_1$, $m_2$ and large $m_1$, $n_2$. A key tool in making the estimate is counting the number of trees of particular classes