18 research outputs found
An outline of polar spaces: basics and advances
This paper is an extended version of a series of lectures on polar spaces
given during the workshop and conference 'Groups and Geometries', held at the
Indian Statistical Institute in Bangalore in December 2012. The aim of this
paper is to give an overview of the theory of polar spaces focusing on some
research topics related to polar spaces. We survey the fundamental results
about polar spaces starting from classical polar spaces. Then we introduce and
report on the state of the art on the following research topics: polar spaces
of infinite rank, embedding polar spaces in groups and projective embeddings of
dual polar spaces
Vertex opposition in spherical buildings
We study to which extent all pairs of opposite vertices of self-opposite type determine a given building. We provide complete answers in the case of buildings related to projective spaces, to polar spaces and the exceptional buildings, but for the latter we restrict to the vertices whose Grassmannian defines a parapolar space of point diameter 3. Some results about non-self opposite types for buildings of types , (m odd), and are also provided