David Garber

CLASSES OF WIRING DIAGRAMS AND THEIR INVARIANTS

Wiring diagrams usually serve as a tool in the study of arrangements of lines and pseudolines. In this paper we go in the opposite direction, using known properties of line arrangements to motivate certain equivalence relations and actions on sets of wiring diagrams, which preserve the incidence lattice and the fundamental groups of the affine and projective complements of the diagrams. These actions are used in [GTV] to classify real arrangements of up to 8 lines and show that in this case, the incidence lattice determines both the affine and the projective fundamental groups.

A CONJUGATION-FREE GEOMETRIC PRESENTATION OF FUNDAMENTAL GROUPS OF ARRANGEMENTS II: EXPANSION AND SOME PROPERTIES

A conjugation-free geometric presentation of a fundamental group is a presentation with the natural topological generators

π1-classification of real arrangements with up to eight lines

x_1, ..., x_n

On the fundamental group of the complement of two real tangent conics and an arbitrary number of real tangent lines

and the cyclic relations:

Spindle-configurations of skew lines

x_{i_k}x_{i_{k-1}} ... x_{i_1} = x_{i_{k-1}} ... x_{i_1} x_{i_k} = ... = x_{i_1} x_{i_k} ... x_{i_2}

Plane curves and their fundamental groups: Generalizations of Uludağ’s construction

with no conjugations on the generators. We have already proved that if the graph of the arrangement is a disjoint union of cycles, then its fundamental group has a conjugation-free geometric presentation. In this paper, we extend this property to arrangements whose graphs are a disjoint union of cycle-tree graphs. Moreover, we study some properties of this type of presentations for a fundamental group of a line arrangements complement. We show that these presentations satisfy a completeness property in the sense of Dehornoy, if the corresponding graph of the arrangement has no edges. The completeness property is a powerful property which leads to many nice properties concerning the presentation (such as the left-cancellativity of the associated monoid and yields some simple criterion for the solvability of the word problem in the group).

A Mechanical Derivation of the Area of the Sphere

Abstract One of the open questions in the geometry of line arrangements is to what extent does the incidence lattice of an arrangement determine its fundamental group. Line arrangements of up to 6 lines were recently classified by K.M. Fan (Michigan Math. J. 44(2) (1997) 283), and it turns out that the incidence lattice of such arrangements determines the projective fundamental group. We use actions on the set of wiring diagrams, introduced in (Garber et al. (J. Knot Theory Ramf.), to classify real arrangements of up to 8 lines. In particular, we show that the incidence lattice of such arrangements determines both the affine and the projective fundamental groups.

Length-based attacks in polycyclic groups

We compute the simplified presentations of the fundamental groups of the complements of the family of real conic-line arrangements with up to two conics which are tangent to each other at two points, with an arbitrary number of tangent lines to both conics. All the resulting groups turn out to be big.

Recursions for the flag-excedance number in colored permutations groups

We prove a conjecture of Crapo and Penne which characterizes isotopy classes of skew configurations with spindle-structure. We use this result in order to define an invariant, spindle-genus, for spindle-configurations. We also slightly simplify the exposition of some known invariants for configurations of skew lines and use them to define a natural partition of the lines in a skew configuration. Finally, we describe an algorithm which constructs a spindle in a given switching class, or proves non-existence of such a spindle.

Probabilistic solutions of equations in the braid group

In this paper we investigate Uluda gs method for constructing new curves whose fundamental groups are central extensions of the funda- mental group of the original curve by nite cyclic groups. In the rst part, we give some generalizations to his method in order to get new families of curves with controlled fundamental groups. In the second part, we discuss some properties of groups which are preserved by these methods. Afterwards, we describe precisely the families of curves which can be obtained by applying the generalized methods to several types of plane curves. We also give an application of the general methods for constructing new Zariski pairs. AMS Classication 14H30; 20E22,20F16,20F18