Michal Adamaszek

The Vietoris–Rips complexes of a circle

Given a metric space X and a distance threshold r>0, the Vietoris-Rips simplicial complex has as its simplices the finite subsets of X of diameter less than r. A theorem of Jean-Claude Hausmann states that if X is a Riemannian manifold and r is sufficiently small, then the Vietoris-Rips complex is homotopy equivalent to the original manifold. Little is known about the behavior of Vietoris-Rips complexes for larger values of r, even though these complexes arise naturally in applications using persistent homology. We show that as r increases, the Vietoris-Rips complex of the circle obtains the homotopy types of the circle, the 3-sphere, the 5-sphere, the 7-sphere, ..., until finally it is contractible. As our main tool we introduce a directed graph invariant, the winding fraction, which in some sense is dual to the circular chromatic number. Using the winding fraction we classify the homotopy types of the Vietoris-Rips complex of an arbitrary (possibly infinite) subset of the circle, and we study the expected homotopy type of the Vietoris-Rips complex of a uniformly random sample from the circle. Moreover, we show that as the distance parameter increases, the ambient Cech complex of the circle also obtains the homotopy types of the circle, the 3-sphere, the 5-sphere, the 7-sphere, ..., until finally it is contractible.

Nerve Complexes of Circular Arcs

We show that the nerve and clique complexes of n arcs in the circle are homotopy equivalent to either a point, an odd-dimensional sphere, or a wedge sum of spheres of the same even dimension. Moreover this homotopy type can be computed in time

Splittings of independence complexes and the powers of cycles

O(n\log n)

On Vietoris–Rips complexes of ellipses

O(nlogn). For the particular case of the nerve complex of evenly-spaced arcs of the same length, we determine explicit homology bases and we relate the complex to a cyclic polytope with n vertices. We give three applications of our knowledge of the homotopy types of nerve complexes of circular arcs. First, we show that the Lovász bound on the chromatic number of a circular complete graph is either sharp or off by one. Second, we use the connection to cyclic polytopes to give a novel topological proof of a known upper bound on the distance between successive roots of a homogeneous trigonometric polynomial. Third, we show that the Vietoris–Rips or ambient Čech simplicial complex of n points in the circle is homotopy equivalent to either a point, an odd-dimensional sphere, or a wedge sum of spheres of the same even dimension, and furthermore this homotopy type can be computed in time

Random cyclic dynamical systems

O(n\log n)

Dense flag triangulations of 3-manifolds via extremal graph theory

O(nlogn).