Pachner Move 3->3 and Affine Volume-Preserving Geometry in R^3

The spaces of triangulations of a given manifold have been widely studied. The celebrated theorem of Pachner~\cite{Pachner} says that any two triangulations of a given manifold can be connected by a sequence of bistellar moves, or Pachner moves, see also~\cite{GKZ,Nabutovsky}. In the present paper we consider groups which naturally appear when considering the set of triangulations with fixed number of simplices of maximal dimension. There are three ways of introducing this gr...

Classical results of Cauchy and Dehn imply that the 1-skeleton of a convex polyhedron $P$ is rigid i.e. every continuous motion of the vertices of $P$ in $\mathbb R^3$ which preserves its edge lengths results in a polyhedron which is congruent to $P$. This result was extended to convex poytopes in $\mathbb R^d$ for all $d\geq 3$ by Whiteley, and to generic realisations of 1-skeletons of simplicial $(d-1)$-manifolds in $\mathbb R^{d}$ by Kalai for $d\geq 4$ and Fogelsanger for...

We often rely on censuses of triangulations to guide our intuition in $3$-manifold topology. However, this can lead to misplaced faith in conjectures if the smallest counterexamples are too large to appear in our census. Since the number of triangulations increases super-exponentially with size, there is no way to expand a census beyond relatively small triangulations; the current census only goes up to $10$ tetrahedra. Here, we show that it is feasible to search for large an...

It was recently shown that there exists an explicit bound for the number of Pachner moves needed to connect any two triangulation of any Haken 3-manifold which contains no fibred sub-manifolds as strongly simple pieces of its JSJ-decomposition. In this paper we prove a generalisation of that result to all knot complements. The explicit formula for the bound is in terms of the numbers of tetrahedra in the two triangulations. This gives a conceptually trivial algorithm for reco...

It is proved that a triangulation of a polyhedron can always be transformed into any other triangulation of the polyhedron by using only elementary moves. One consequence is that an additive function (valuation) defined only on simplices may always be extended to an additive function on all polyhedra.

In this paper we give algebraic characterizations of the affine $2$-space and the affine $3$-space over an algebraically closed field of characteristic zero, using a variant of the Makar-Limanov invariant.

In this paper we extend the classical theory of combinatorial manifolds to the non-homogeneous setting. NH-manifolds are polyhedra which are locally like Euclidean spaces of varying dimensions. We show that many of the properties of classical manifolds remain valid in this wider context. NH-manifolds appear naturally when studying Pachner moves on (classical) manifolds. We introduce the notion of NH-factorization and prove that PL-homeomorphic manifolds are related by a finit...

We afford a systematic and comprehensive account of the canonical dynamics of 4D Regge Calculus perturbatively expanded to linear order around a flat background. To this end, we consider the Pachner moves which generate the most basic and general simplicial evolution scheme. The linearized regime features a vertex displacement (`diffeomorphism') symmetry for which we derive an abelian constraint algebra. This permits to identify gauge invariant `lattice gravitons' as propagat...

This book is addressed to students, professors and researchers of geometry, who will find herein many interesting and original results. The originality of the book The Geometry of Homological Triangles consists in using the homology of triangles as a "filter" through which remarkable notions and theorems from the geometry of the triangle are unitarily passed. Our research is structured in seven chapters, the first four are dedicated to the homology of the triangles, while the...

A natural extension of Heron's 2000 year old formula for the area of a triangle to the volume of a tetrahedron is presented. This gives the fourth power of the volume as a polynomial in six simple rational functions of the areas of its four faces and three medial parallelograms, which will be referred to herein as "interior faces." Geometrically, these rational functions are the areas of the triangles into which the exterior faces are divided by the points at which the tetrah...