We present several aspects of the "topology of meromorphic functions", which we conceive as a general theory which includes the topology of holomorphic functions, the topology of pencils on quasi-projective spaces and the topology of polynomial functions.
We prove that a meromorphic map defined on the complement of a compact subset of a three-dimensional Stein manifold M and with values in a compact complex three-fold X extends to the complement of a finite set of points. If X is simply connected, then the map extends to all of M.
Regarding the resolution of singularities for the differential equations of Painlevé type, there are important differences between the second-order Painlevé equations and those of higher order. Unlike the second-order case, in higher order cases there may exist some meromorphic solution spaces with codimension 2. In this paper, we will give an explicit global resolution of singularities for a 3-parameter family of third-order differential systems with meromorphic solution spaces of codimension 2.
This note explains a construction of a Poisson manifold whose symplectic foliation describes a deformation of a moduli space of meromorphic connections with unramified irregular singularities. In particular, this deformation of the moduli space corresponds to the unfolding of irregular singularities of the meromorphic connections. This is an announcement of some results in the forthcoming paper.
In a previous paper the authors elaborated notions and technique which could be applied to compute such invariants of polynomials as Euler characteristics of fibres and zeta-functions of monodromy transformations associated with a polynomial. Some crucial basic properties of the notions related to the topology of meromorphic germs were not discussed there. This has produced some lack of understanding of the general constructions. The aim of this note is to partially fill in this gap. At the same time we describe connections with some previous results and generalizations of them.
A meromorphic connection on the complex projective line induces formal connections at each singular point, and these formal connections constitute the local behavior at the singularities. In this primarily expository paper, we discuss the extent to which specified local behavior at singular points determines the global connection. In particular, given a finite set of points and a collection of ``formal types'' at these points, does there exist a moduli space of meromorphic connections with this local behavior, and if so, when is this moduli space nonempty or a singleton? In this paper, we disc…
In analogy with the holomorphic case, we compare the topology of Milnor fibrations associated to a meromorphic germ f/g : the local Milnor fibrations given on Milnor tubes over punctured discs around the critical values of f/g, and the Milnor fibration on a sphere.
In this paper, we prove that the Milnor fibre of a singularity over an i.c.i.s. of dimension 3 has the homotopy type of a bouquet of spheres, provided that the function that defines the singularity has finite extended codimension with respect to the ideal that defines the i.c.i.s.
We study the topology of polynomial functions by deforming them generically. We explain how the non-conservation of the total ``quantity'' of singularity in the neighbourhood of infinity is related to the variation of topology in certain families of boundary singularities along the hyperplane at infinity.
We study the topology of some simple infinite dimensional singularities arising from spaces of \emph{algebraic formal loops}. We prove that in some simple cases the natural analogue of nearby cycles cohomology for a function on the loop space vanishes, and show further that a suitably renormalized version of the above cohomology produces a simple (non-zero) result.
We study graded rings of meromorphic Hermitian modular forms of degree two whose poles are supported on an arrangement of Heegner divisors. For the group $\mathrm{SU}_{2,2}(\mathcal{O}_K)$ where $K$ is the imaginary-quadratic number field of discriminant $-d$, $d \in \{4, 7, 8, 11, 15, 19, 20, 24\}$ we obtain a polynomial algebra without relations. In particular the Looijenga compactifications of the arrangement complements are weighted projective spaces.
We prove that the boundaries of the Milnor fibers of smoothings of non-isolated reduced complex surface singularities are graph manifolds. Moreover, we give a method, inspired by previous work of Némethi and Szilard, to compute associated plumbing graphs.
Isolated Cohen-Macaulay codimension 2 singularities share many common features with isolated complete intersection singularities, but they also exhibit some striking new behaviour. One such instance was recently observed by Damon and Pike in their study of the vanishing topology and Euler characteristic, where they took this class of singularities as examples. In this article, we explore their findings further by determining the Betti numbers explicitly and explain the new phenomena. An important tool here is the Tjurina modification relating a Cohen-Macaulay codimension 2 singularity to a fin…
Kähler's paper "Über die Verzweigung einer algebraischen Funktion zweier Veränderlichen in der Umgebung einer singulären Stelle" offered a more perceptual view of the link of a complex plane curve singularity than that provided shortly before by Brauner. Kähler's innovation of using a "square sphere" became standard in the toolkit of later researchers on singularities. We describe his contribution and survey developments since then, including a brief discussion of the topology of isolated hypersurface singularities in higher dimension.
For any elliptic normal surface singularity with rational homology sphere link we consider a new elliptic sequence, which differs from the one introduced by Laufer and S. S.-T. Yau. However, we show that their length coincide. Using the properties of both sequences we succeed to connect the common length with the geometric genus and also with several topological invariants, e.g. with the Seiberg--Witten invariant of the link.
We study the topology of a line singularity, which is a complex hypersurface with non-isolated singularity given by a complex line. We describe the degeneration of its Milnor fibre to the singular hypersurface by means of a pair of polyhedra, one in the Milnor fibre and other in the singular fibre, which are deformation retracts of the corresponding fibres; and a continuous map taking the Milnor fibre to the singular fibre and the first polyhedron to the second one, which restrict to a homeomorphism outside the polyhedra. In the same sense, we also study the topology of a complex isolated sing…
This is the paper as published. The topology of a complex plane curve singularity with real branches is deduced from any real deformation having delta crossings. An example of the computation of the global geometric monodromy of a polynomial mapping is added.
Let $Y$ be a complex projective variety of dimension $n$ with isolated singularities, $π:X\to Y$ a resolution of singularities, $G:=π^{-1}\left(\rm{Sing}(Y)\right)$ the exceptional locus. From the Decomposition Theorem one knows that the map $H^{k-1}(G)\to H^k(Y,Y\backslash {\rm{Sing}}(Y))$ vanishes for $k>n$. It is also known that, conversely, assuming this vanishing one can prove the Decomposition Theorem for $π$ in few pages. The purpose of the present paper is to exhibit a direct proof of the vanishing. As a consequence, it follows a complete and short proof of the Decomposition Theorem fo…
Khimshiashvili proved a topological degree formula for the Eu-ler characteristic of the Milnor fibres of a real function-germ with an isolated singularity. We give two generalizations of this result for non-isolated singularities. As corollaries we obtain an algebraic formula for the Euler characteristic of the fibres of a real weighted-homogeneous polynomial and a real version of the L{ê}-Iomdine formula. We have also included some results of the same flavor on the local topology of locally closed definable sets.
We overview our recent work defining and studying normal crossings varieties and subvarieties in symplectic topology. This work answers a question of Gromov on the feasibility of introducing singular (sub)varieties into symplectic topology in the case of normal crossings singularities. It also provides a necessary and sufficient condition for smoothing normal crossings symplectic varieties. In addition, we explain some connections with other areas of mathematics and discuss a few directions for further research.
This expository talk is an expanded version of a lecture at G.-M. Greuel's 60th Birthday Conference in Kaiserslautern in October, 2004. We survey recent work of Neumann-Wahl and others on the relation between topology and geometry of normal surface singularities, especially how to write explicit equations of a singularity with given topology, in case the link is a rational homology sphere (i.e., the resolution graph is a tree of rational curves). Specifically, under some reasonable conditions on the link, there is an explicit "complete intersection of splice type" whose link is the universal a…
This article recounts the interaction of topology and singularity theory (mainly singularities of complex algebraic varieties) which started in the early part of this century and bloomed in the 1960's with the work of Hirzebruch, Brieskorn, Milnor and others. Some of the topics are followed to the present day. (A chapter for the book "History of Topology", ed. I. M. James)
In this paper we use the results from the first part to compute the vanishing topology for matrix singularities based on certain spaces of matrices. We place the variety of singular matrices in a geometric configuration of free divisors which are the "exceptional orbit varieties" for repesentations of solvable groups. Because there are towers of representations for towers of solvable groups, the free divisors actually form a tower of free divisors $E_n$, and we give an inductive procedure for computing the vanishing topology of the matrix singularities. The inductive procedure we use is an ext…
In recent work, we introduced topological notions of simple normal crossings symplectic divisor and variety, showed that they are equivalent, in a suitable sense, to the corresponding geometric notions, and established a topological smoothability criterion for them. The present paper extends these notions to arbitrary normal crossings singularities, from both local and global perspectives, and shows that they are also equivalent to the corresponding geometric notions. In subsequent papers, we extend our smoothability criterion to arbitrary normal crossings symplectic varieties and construct a …
The splice quotients are an interesting class of normal surface singularities with rational homology sphere links, defined by W. Neumann and J. Wahl. If Gamma is a tree of rational curves that satisfies certain combinatorial conditions, then there exist splice quotients with resolution graph Gamma. Suppose the equation z^n=f(x,y) defines a surface X_{f,n} with an isolated singularity at the origin in C^3. For f irreducible, we completely characterize, in terms of n and a variant of the Puiseux pairs of f, those X_{f,n} for which the resolution graph satisfies the combinatorial conditions that …
Let $Y$ be a complex projective variety of dimension $n$ with isolated singularities, $π:X\to Y$ a resolution of singularities, $G:=π^{-1}{\rm{Sing}}(Y)$ the exceptional locus. From Decomposition Theorem one knows that the map $H^{k-1}(G)\to H^k(Y,Y\backslash {\rm{Sing}}(Y))$ vanishes for $k>n$. Assuming this vanishing, we give a short proof of Decomposition Theorem for $π$. A consequence is a short proof of the Decomposition Theorem for $π$ in all cases where one can prove the vanishing directly. This happens when either $Y$ is a normal surface, or when $π$ is the blowing-up of $Y$ along ${\r…
We proof here the existence of a topological thick and thin decomposition of any closed definable thick isolated singularity germ in the spirit of the recently discovered metric thick and thin decomposition of complex normal surface singularities of [10]. Our thin zone catches exactly the homology of the family of the links collapsing faster than linearly. Simultaneously we introduce a class of rigid homeomorphisms more general than bi-Lipschitz ones, which map the topological thin zone onto the topological thin zone of its image. As a consequence of this point of view for the class of singula…
Given an algebraic variety X defined over an algebraically closed field, we study the space RZ(X,x) consisting of all the valuations of the function field of X which are centered in a closed point x of X. We concentrate on its homeomorphism type. We prove that, when x is a regular point, this homeomorphism type only depends on the dimension of X. If x is a singular point of a normal surface, we show that it only depends on the dual graph of a good resolution of (X,x) up to some precise equivalence. This is done by studying the relation between RZ(X,x) and the normalized non-Archimedean link of…
Let M be a meromorphic connection with poles along a smooth divisor D in a smooth algebraic variety. Let Sol M be the solution complex of M. We prove that the good formal decomposition locus of M coincides with the locus where the restrictions to D of Sol M and Sol End M are local systems. By contrast to the very different natures of these loci (the first one is defined via algebra, the second one is defined via analysis), the proof of their coincidence is geometric. It relies on the moduli of Stokes torsors.
We survey the use of continued fraction expansions in the algebraical and topological study of complex analytic singularities. We also prove new results, firstly concerning a geometric duality with respect to a lattice between plane supplementary cones and secondly concerning the existence of a canonical plumbing structure on the abstract boundaries (also called links) of normal surface singularities. The duality between supplementary cones gives in particular a geometric interpretation of a duality discovered by Hirzebruch between the continued fraction expansions of two numbers l >1 and l/(l…
Thom polynomials measure how global topology forces singularities. The power of Thom polynomials predestine them to be a useful tool not only in differential topology, but also in algebraic geometry (enumerative geometry, moduli spaces) and algebraic combinatorics. The main obstacle of their widespread application is that only a few, sporadic Thom polynomials have been known explicitly. In this paper we develop a general method for calculating Thom polynomials of contact singularities. Along the way, relations with the equivariant geometry of (punctual, local) Hilbert schemes, and with iterate…
We consider a real analytic map $F=(f_1,...,f_k) : (\mathbb{R}^n,0) \rightarrow (\mathbb{R}^k,0)$, $2 \le k \le n-1$, that satisfies Milnor's conditions (a) and (b) introduced by D. Massey. This implies that every real analytic $f_I=(f_{i_1},...,f_{i_l}) : (\mathbb{R}^n,0) \rightarrow (\mathbb{R}^l,0)$, induced from $F$ by projections where $1 \le l \le n-2$ and $I=\{i_1,...,i_l\}$, also satisfies Milnor's conditions (a) and (b). We give several relations between the Euler characteristics of the Milnor fibre of $F$, the Milnor fibres of the maps $f_I$, the link of $F^{-1}(0)$ and the links of …
We study the topology of the complements of discriminants of simple real boundary singularities by counting the connected components of these sets and assigning to them certain topological characteristics. Results of this paper serve as a generalization of those recently acquired by Vassiliev arXiv:2109.12287 for ordinary function singularities.
We introduce topological notions of normal crossings symplectic divisor and variety and establish that they are equivalent, in a suitable sense, to the desired geometric notions. Our proposed concept of equivalence of associated topological and geometric notions fits ideally with important constructions in symplectic topology. This partially answers Gromov's question on the feasibility of defining singular symplectic (sub)varieties and lays foundation for rich developments in the future. In subsequent papers, we establish a smoothability criterion for symplectic normal crossings varieties, in …
We study the cohomology of the generic determinantal varieties $M_{m,n}^s = \{ φ\in \mathbb C^{m\times n} : \mathrm{rank} φ<s \}$, their polar multiplicities, their sections $D_k \cap M_{m,n}^s$ by generic hyperplanes $D_k$ of various dimension $k$, and the real and complex links of the spaces $(D_k\cap M_{m,n}^s,0)$. Such complex links were shown to provide the basic building blocks in a bouquet decomposition for the (determinantal) smoothings of smoothable isolated determinantal singularities. The detailed vanishing topology of such singularities was still not fully understood beyond isolate…
In this article we study the topology of a family of real analytic germs $F \colon (\mathbb{C}^3,0) \to (\mathbb{C},0)$ with isolated critical point at 0, given by $F(x,y,z)=f(x,y)\bar{g(x,y)}+z^r$, where $f$ and $g$ are holomorphic, $r \in \mathbb{Z}^+$ and $r \geq 2$. We describe the link $L_F$ as a graph manifold using its natural open book decomposition, related to the Milnor fibration of the map-germ $f \bar{g}$ and the description of its monodromy as a quasi-periodic diffeomorphism through its Nielsen invariants. Furthermore, such a germ $F$ gives rise to a Milnor fibration $\frac{F}{|F|…
Our previous papers introduce topological notions of normal crossings symplectic divisor and variety, show that they are equivalent, in a suitable sense, to the corresponding geometric notions, and establish a topological smoothability criterion for normal crossings symplectic varieties. The present paper constructs a blowup, a complex line bundle, and a logarithmic tangent bundle naturally associated with a normal crossings symplectic divisor and determines the Chern class of the last bundle. These structures hav applications in constructions and analysis of various moduli spaces. As a coroll…
Let X be a minimal surface of general type with positive geometric genus ($b_+ > 1$) and let $K^2$ be the square of its canonical class. Building on work of Khodorovskiy and Rana, we prove that if X develops a Wahl singularity of length $\ell$ in a Q-Gorenstein degeneration, then $\ell \leq 4K^2 + 7$. This improves on the current best-known upper bound due to Lee ($\ell \leq 400(K^2)^4$). Our bound follows from a stronger theorem constraining symplectic embeddings of certain rational homology balls in surfaces of general type. In particular, we show that if the rational homology ball $B_{p,1}$…
Given a polynomial map $ψ:S^m\to \mathbb{R}^k$ with components of degree $d$, we investigate the structure of the semialgebraic set $Z\subseteq S^m$ consisting of those points where $ψ$ and its derivatives satisfy a given list of polynomial equalities and inequalities (we call such a set a "singularity"). Concerning the upper estimate on the topological complexity of a polynomial singularity, we sharpen the classical bound $b(Z)\leq O(d^{m+1})$, proved by Milnor, with \begin{equation}\label{eq:abstract} b(Z)\leq O(d^{m}),\end{equation} which holds for the generic polynomial map. For what conce…