We describe an algorithm for the enumeration of (candidates of) vertex-transitive combinatorial $d$-manifolds. With an implementation of our algorithm, we determine, up to combinatorial equivalence, all combinatorial manifolds with a vertex-transitive automorphism group on $n\leq 13$ vertices. With the exception of actions of groups of small order, the enumeration is extended to 14 and 15 vertices.
We investigate a type of distance between triangulations on finite type surfaces where one moves between triangulations by performing simultaneous flips. We consider triangulations up to homeomorphism and our main results are upper bounds on distance between triangulations that only depend on the topology of the surface.
For a field $\mathbb{F}$, the notion of $\mathbb{F}$-tightness of simplicial complexes was introduced by Kühnel. Kühnel and Lutz conjectured that any $\mathbb{F}$-tight triangulation of a closed manifold is the most economic of all possible triangulations of the manifold. The boundary of a triangle is the only $\mathbb{F}$-tight triangulation of a closed 1-manifold. A triangulation of a closed 2-manifold is $\mathbb{F}$-tight if and only if it is $\mathbb{F}$-orientable and neighbourly. In this paper we prove that a triangulation of a closed 3-manifold is $\mathbb{F}$-tight if and only if it i…
Tight triangulated manifolds are generalisations of neighborly triangulations of closed surfaces and are interesting objects in Combinatorial Topology. Tight triangulated manifolds are conjectured to be minimal. Except few, all the known tight triangulated manifolds are stacked. It is known that locally stacked tight triangulated manifolds are strongly minimal. Except for three infinite series and neighborly surfaces, very few tight triangulated manifolds are known. From some recent works, we know more on tight triangulation. In this article, we present a survey on the works done on tight tria…
A triangulation of a surface is called $q$-equivelar if each of its vertices is incident with exactly $q$ triangles. In 1972 Altshuler had shown that an equivelar triangulation of torus has a Hamiltonian Circuit. Here we present a necessary and sufficient condition for existence of a contractible Hamiltonian Cycle in equivelar triangulation of a surface.
Walkup's class ${\cal K}(d)$ consists of the $d$-dimensional simplicial complexes all whose vertex links are stacked $(d-1)$-spheres. According to a result of Walkup, the face vector of any triangulated 4-manifold $X$ with Euler characteristic $χ$ satisfies $f_1 \geq 5f_0 - 15/2 χ$, with equality only for $X \in {\cal K}(4)$. Kühnel observed that this implies $f_0(f_0 - 11) \geq -15χ$, with equality only for 2-neighborly members of ${\cal K}(4)$. For $n = 6, 11$ and 15, there are triangulated 4-manifolds with $f_0=n$ and $f_0(f_0 - 11) = -15χ$. In this article, we present triangulated 4-manifo…
We give an explicit construction of vertex-transitive tight triangulations of $d$-manifolds for $d\geq 2$. More explicitly, for each $d\geq 2$, we construct two $(d^2+5d+5)$-vertex neighborly triangulated $d$-manifolds whose vertex-links are stacked spheres. The only other non-trivial series of such tight triangulated manifolds currently known is the series of non-simply connected triangulated $d$-manifolds with $2d+3$ vertices constructed by Kühnel. The manifolds we construct are strongly minimal. For $d\geq 3$, they are also tight neighborly as defined by Lutz, Sulanke and Swartz. Like Kühne…
We prove two results on stacked triangulated manifolds in this paper: (a) every stacked triangulation of a connected manifold with or without boundary is obtained from a simplex or the boundary of a simplex by certain combinatorial operations; (b) in dimension $d \geq 4$, if $Δ$ is a tight connected closed homology $d$-manifold whose $i$th homology vanishes for $1 < i < d-1$, then $Δ$ is a stacked triangulation of a manifold.These results give affirmative answers to questions posed by Novik and Swartz and by Effenberger.
In combinatorial topology we aim to triangulate manifolds such that their topological properties are reflected in the combinatorial structure of their description. Here, we give a combinatorial criterion on when exactly triangulations of 3-manifolds with transitive cyclic symmetry can be generalised to an infinite family of such triangulations with similarly strong combinatorial properties. In particular, we construct triangulations of Seifert fibred spaces with transitive cyclic symmetry where the symmetry preserves the fibres and acts non-trivially on the homology of the spaces. The triangul…
We show that any surface of infinite type admits an ideal triangulation. Furthermore, we show that a set of disjoint arcs can be completed into a triangulation if and only if, as a set, they intersect every simple closed curve a finite number of times.
In this survey on combinatorial properties of triangulated manifolds we discuss various lower bounds on the number of vertices of simplicial and combinatorial manifolds. Moreover, we give a list of all known examples of vertex-minimal triangulations.
We explicitly construct small triangulations for a number of well-known 3-dimensional manifolds and give a brief outline of some aspects of the underlying theory of 3-manifolds and its historical development.
A $triangulation$ is an embedding of a graph on surfaces where every face has length three. In this article, we show the existence of contractible Hamiltonian cycle in triangulated maps of which minimum degree is four.
In this paper, we describe geometrical constructions to obtain triangulations of connected sums of closed orientable triangulated 3-manifolds. Using these constructions, we show that it takes time polynomial in the number of tetrahedra to check if a closed orientable 3-manifold, equipped with a minimal triangulation, is reducible or not. This result can easily be generalized to compact orientable 3-manifolds with non-empty boundary.
We present and apply a method for disproving the existence of polyhedral immersions in $\mathbb{R}^3$ of certain triangulations on non-orientable surfaces. In particular, it is proved that neither of the two vertex-minimal, neighborly 9-vertex triangulations of the non-orientable surface of genus 5 are realizable as immersed polyhedral surfaces in $\mathbb{R}^3$.
For $d \geq 2$, Walkup's class ${\cal K}(d)$ consists of the $d$-dimensional simplicial complexes all whose vertex-links are stacked $(d-1)$-spheres. Kalai showed that for $d \geq 4$, all connected members of ${\cal K}(d)$ are obtained from stacked $d$-spheres by finitely many elementary handle additions. According to a result of Walkup, the face vector of any triangulated 4-manifold $X$ with Euler characteristic $χ$ satisfies $f_1 \geq 5f_0 - {15/2} χ$, with equality only for $X \in {\cal K}(4)$. Kühnel observed that this implies $f_0(f_0 - 11) \geq -15χ$, with equality only for 2-neighborly …
It is known that the $(2k-1)$-sphere has at most $2^{O(n^k \log n)}$ combinatorially distinct triangulations with $n$ vertices, for every $k\ge 2$. Here we construct at least $2^{Ω(n^k)}$ such triangulations, improving on the previous constructions which gave $2^{Ω(n^{k-1})}$ in the general case (Kalai) and $2^{Ω(n^{5/4})}$ for $k=2$ (Pfeifle-Ziegler). We also construct $2^{Ω\left(n^{k-1+\frac{1}{k}}\right)}$ geodesic (a.k.a. star-convex) $n$-vertex triangualtions of the $(2k-1)$-sphere. As a step for this (in the case $k=2$) we construct $n$-vertex $4$-polytopes containing $Ω(n^{3/2})$ facets…
We study a variation of Bagchi and Datta's $σ$-vector of a simplicial complex $C$, whose entries are defined as weighted averages of Betti numbers of induced subcomplexes of $C$. We show that these invariants satisfy an Alexander-Dehn-Sommerville type identity, and behave nicely under natural operations on triangulated manifolds and spheres such as connected sums and bistellar flips. In the language of commutative algebra, the invariants are weighted sums of graded Betti numbers of the Stanley-Reisner ring of $C$. This interpretation implies, by a result of Adiprasito, that the Billera-Lee sph…
A triangulated $d$-manifold $K$, satisfies the inequality $\binom{f_0(K)-d-1}{2}\geq \binom{d+2}{2}β_1(K;\mathbb{Z}_2)$ for $d\geq 3$. The triangulated $d$-manifolds that meet the bound with equality are called {\em tight neighborly}. In this paper, we present tight neighborly triangulations of 4-manifolds on 15 vertices with $\mathbb{Z}_3$ as automorphism group. One such example wasconstructed by Bagchi and Datta in 2011. We show that there are exactly 12 such triangulations up to isomorphism, 10 of which are orientable.
Principal circle bundle over a PL polyhedron can be triangulated and thus obtains combinatorics. The triangulation is assembled from triangulated circle bundles over simplices. To every triangulated circle bundle over a simplex we associate a necklace (in combinatorial sense). We express rational local formulas for all powers of first Chern class in the terms of mathematical expectations of parities of the associated necklaces. This rational parity is a combinatorial isomorphism invariant of triangulated circle bundle over simplex, measuring mixing by triangulation of the circular graphs over …
The search for universality in random triangulations of manifolds, like those featuring in (Euclidean) Dynamical Triangulations, is central to the random geometry approach to quantum gravity. In case of the 3-sphere, or any other manifold of dimension greater than two for that matter, the pursuit is held back by serious challenges, including the wide open problem of enumerating triangulations. In an attempt to bypass the toughest challenges we identify a restricted family of triangulations, of which the enumeration appears less daunting. In a nutshell, the family consists of triangulated 3-sph…
We show that any two geometric triangulations of a closed hyperbolic, spherical or Euclidean manifold are related by a sequence of Pachner moves and barycentric subdivisions of bounded length. This bound is in terms of the dimension of the manifold, the number of top dimensional simplexes and bound on the lengths of edges of the triangulation. This leads to an algorithm to check from the combinatorics of the triangulation and bounds on lengths of edges, if two geometrically triangulated closed hyperbolic or low dimensional spherical manifolds are isometric or not.
Tightness of a triangulated manifold is a topological condition, roughly meaning that any simplexwise linear embedding of the triangulation into euclidean space is "as convex as possible". It can thus be understood as a generalization of the concept of convexity. In even dimensions, super-neighborliness is known to be a purely combinatorial condition which implies the tightness of a triangulation. Here we present other sufficient and purely combinatorial conditions which can be applied to the odd-dimensional case as well. One of the conditions is that all vertex links are stacked spheres, whic…
Geometric torsions are torsions of acyclic complexes of vector spaces which consist of differentials of geometric quantities assigned to the elements of a manifold triangulation. We use geometric torsions to construct invariants for a manifold with a triangulated boundary. These invariants can be naturally united in a vector, and a change of the boundary triangulation corresponds to a linear transformation of this vector. Moreover, when two manifolds are glued by their common boundary, these vectors undergo scalar multiplication, i.e., they work according to M. Atiyah's axioms for a topologica…
Let S be a triangulated 2-sphere with fixed triangulation T. We apply the methods of thin position from knot theory to obtain a simple version of the three geodesics theorem for the 2-sphere [5]. In general these three geodesics may be unstable, corresponding, for example, to the three equators of an ellipsoid. Using a piece-wise linear approach, we show that we can usually find at least three stable geodesics.
In graph theory, as well as in 3-manifold topology, there exist several width-type parameters to describe how "simple" or "thin" a given graph or 3-manifold is. These parameters, such as pathwidth or treewidth for graphs, or the concept of thin position for 3-manifolds, play an important role when studying algorithmic problems; in particular, there is a variety of problems in computational 3-manifold topology - some of them known to be computationally hard in general - that become solvable in polynomial time as soon as the dual graph of the input triangulation has bounded treewidth. In view of…
We give three constructions of a vertex-minimal triangulation of $4$-dimensional real projective space $\mathbb{R}P^4$. The first construction describes a $4$-dimensional sphere on $32$ vertices, which is a double cover of a triangulated $\mathbb{R}P^4$ and has a large amount of symmetry. The second and third constructions illustrate approaches to improving the known number of vertices needed to triangulate $n$-dimensional real projective space. All three constructions deliver the same combinatorial manifold, which is also the same as the only known $16$-vertex triangulation of $\mathbb{R}P^4$…
A family of one-vertex triangulations of 3-manifolds, layered-triangulations, is defined. Layered-triangulations are first described for handlebodies and then extended to all 3-manifolds via Heegaard splittings. A complete and detailed analysis of layered-triangulations is given in the cases of the solid torus and lens spaces, including the classification of all normal and almost normal surfaces in these triangulations. Minimal layered-triangulations of lens spaces provide a common setting for new proofs of the classification of lens spaces admitting an embedded non orientable surface and the …
In this thesis, we use normal surface theory to understand certain properties of minimal triangulations of compact orientable 3-manifolds. We describe the collapsing process of normal 2-spheres and disks. Using some geometrical constructions to take connected sums of triangulated 3-manifolds, we obtain the following result: given a minimal triangulation of a closed orientable 3-manifold M, it takes polynomial time in the number of tetrahedra to check if M is reducible or not.
We construct a function of the edge-lengths of a triangulated surface whose variation under a rescaling of all the edges that meet at a vertex is the defect angle at that vertex. We interpret this function as a gravitational effective action on the triangulation, and the variation as a trace anomaly.
One of the apparent advantages of quantum computers over their classical counterparts is their ability to efficiently contract tensor networks. In this article, we study some implications of this fact in the case of topological tensor networks. The graph underlying these networks is given by the triangulation of a manifold, and the structure of the tensors ensures that the overall tensor is independent of the choice of internal triangulation. This leads to quantum algorithms for additively approximating certain invariants of triangulated manifolds. We discuss the details of this construction i…
We show that in any triangulation of a solid torus, there is a pre-core curve that lies in the 2-skeleton and that intersects the interior of each face in at most 10 straight arcs. By definition, a pre-core curve is a simple closed curve that becomes a core curve when a collar is attached to the boundary of the solid torus. This theorem imposes restrictions on the possible Riemannian metrics on a solid torus. It also has applications in knot theory.
We investigate triangulations of the two-dimensional sphere and torus with the faces properly colored white and black. We focus on matchings between white triangles and incident vertices. On the torus our objects are perfect pairings, whereas on the sphere this is only true after removing one triangle and its vertices. In the latter case, such matchings (first studied by Tutte) extend the notion of state in Kauffman's formal knot theory and we show that his Clock Theorem, in its form due to Gilmer and Litherland, also extends: the set of matchings naturally forms a distributive lattice. Here t…
We give a complete enumeration of all combinatorial 3-manifolds with 10 vertices: There are precisely 247882 triangulated 3-spheres with 10 vertices as well as 518 vertex-minimal triangulations of the sphere product $S^2\times S^1$ and 615 triangulations of the twisted sphere product $S^2_\times_S^1$. All the 3-spheres with up to 10 vertices are shellable, but there are 29 vertex-minimal non-shellable 3-balls with 9 vertices.
Gay and Kirby recently introduced the concept of a trisection for arbitrary smooth, oriented closed 4-manifolds, and with it a new topological invariant, called the trisection genus. This paper improves and implements an algorithm due to Bell, Hass, Rubinstein and Tillmann to compute trisections using triangulations, and extends it to non-orientable 4-manifolds. Lower bounds on trisection genus are given in terms of Betti numbers and used to determine the trisection genus of all standard simply connected PL 4-manifolds. In addition, we construct trisections of small genus directly from the sim…
Tight triangulations are exotic, but highly regular objects in combinatorial topology. A triangulation is tight if all its piecewise linear embeddings into a Euclidean space are as convex as allowed by the topology of the underlying manifold. Tight triangulations are conjectured to be strongly minimal, and proven to be so for dimensions $\leq 3$. However, in spite of substantial theoretical results about such triangulations, there are precious few examples. In fact, apart from dimension two, we do not know if there are infinitely many of them in any given dimension. In this paper, we present a…
Based in the isomorphism between Lie algebroid cohomology and piecewise smooth cohomology, it is proved that the Rham cohomology of a locally trivial Lie groupoid $G$ on a smooth manifold $M$ is isomorphic to the piecewise Rham cohomology of $G$, in which $G$ and $M$ are manifolds without boundary and $M$ is smoothly triangulated by a finite simplicial complex $K$ such that, for each simplex $Δ$ of $K$, the inverse images of $Δ$ by the source and target mappings of $G$ are transverses submanifolds in the ambient space $G$. As a consequence, it is shown that the piecewise de Rham cohomology of …
There are many fundamental algorithmic problems on triangulated 3-manifolds whose complexities are unknown. Here we study the problem of finding a taut angle structure on a 3-manifold triangulation, whose existence has implications for both the geometry and combinatorics of the triangulation. We prove that detecting taut angle structures is NP-complete, but also fixed-parameter tractable in the treewidth of the face pairing graph of the triangulation. These results have deeper implications: the core techniques can serve as a launching point for approaching decision problems such as unknot reco…
We show that the interior of the convex core of a quasifuchsian punctured-torus group admits an ideal decomposition (usually an infinite triangulation) which is canonical in two different senses: in a combinatorial sense via the pleating invariants, and in a geometric sense via an Epstein-Penner convex hull construction in Minkowski space. The result extends to certain non-quasifuchsian punctured-torus groups, and in fact to all of them if a strong version of the Pleating Lamination Conjecture is true.
It is well known that a triangulation of a closed 2-manifold is tight with respect to a field of characteristic two if and only if it is neighbourly; and it is tight with respect to a field of odd characteristic if and only if it is neighbourly and orientable. No such characterization of tightness was previously known for higher dimensional manifolds. In this paper, we prove that a triangulation of a closed 3-manifold is tight with respect to a field of odd characteristic if and only if it is neighbourly, orientable and stacked. In consequence, the Kühnel-Lutz conjecture is valid in dimension …
Here we are fixing an output of a trivial calculation based on Konsevich's differential 2-form for the Chern class of polygon bundle. As a result an interesting combinatorics and arithmetics jumps right out of a jukebox. The calculation gives very simple rational combinatorial characteristics (we call it "curvature") of a triangulated $S^1$ bundle over a 2-simplex, which is a local combinatorial formula for the first Chern class. The curvature is expressed in terms of cyclic word in 3-character alphabet associated to the bundle. From the point of view of simplicial combinatorics the word is a …
Following Matveev, a k-normal surface in a triangulated 3-manifold is a generalization of both normal and (octagonal) almost normal surfaces. Using spines, complexity, and Turaev-Viro invariants of 3-manifolds, we prove the following results: 1) a minimal triangulation of a closed irreducible or a bounded hyperbolic 3-manifold contains no non-trivial k-normal sphere; 2) every triangulation of a closed manifold with at least 2 tetrahedra contains some non-trivial normal surface; 3) every manifold with boundary has only finitely many triangulations without non-trivial normal surfaces. Here, tria…
We consider triangulations of surfaces with edges painted three colors so that edges of each triangle have different colors. Such structures arise as Belyi data (or Grothendieck dessins d'enfant), on the other hand they enumerate pairs of permutations determined up to a common conjugation. The topic of these notes is links of such combinatorial structures with infinite symmetric groups and their representations.
In graph theory, Courcelle's theorem essentially states that, if an algorithmic problem can be formulated in monadic second-order logic, then it can be solved in linear time for graphs of bounded treewidth. We prove such a metatheorem for a general class of triangulations of arbitrary fixed dimension d, including all triangulated d-manifolds: if an algorithmic problem can be expressed in monadic second-order logic, then it can be solved in linear time for triangulations whose dual graphs have bounded treewidth. We apply our results to 3-manifold topology, a setting with many difficult computat…
The present paper follows the computational approach to 3-manifold classification via edge-coloured graphs, already performed by several authors with respect to orientable 3-manifolds up to 28 coloured tetrahedra, non-orientable 3-manifolds up to 26 coloured tetrahedra, genus two 3-manifolds up to 34 coloured tetrahedra: in fact, by automatic generation and analysis of suitable edge-coloured graphs, called crystallizations, we obtain a catalogue of all orientable 3-manifolds admitting coloured triangulations with 30 tetrahedra. These manifolds are unambiguously identified via JSJ decomposition…
For the purposes of this paper, Dehn surgery along a curve K in a 3-manifold M with slope r is `exceptional' if the resulting 3-manifold M_K(r) is reducible or a solid torus, or the core of the surgery solid torus has finite order in the fundamental group of M_K(r). We show that, providing the exterior of K is irreducible and atoroidal, and the distance between r and the meridian slope is more than one, and a homology condition is satisfied, then there is (up to ambient isotopy) only a finite number of such exceptional surgery curves in a given compact orientable 3-manifold M, with the boundar…
A triangulation of a connected closed surface is called weakly regular if the action of its automorphism group on its vertices is transitive. A triangulation of a connected closed surface is called degree-regular if each of its vertices have the same degree. Clearly, a weakly regular triangulation is degree-regular. In 1999, Lutz has classified all the weakly regular triangulations on at most 15 vertices. In 2001, Datta and Nilakantan have classified all the degree-regular triangulations of closed surfaces on at most 11 vertices. In this article, we have proved that any degree-regular triangul…
A connected combinatorial 2-manifold is called degree-regular if each of its vertices have the same degree. A connected combinatorial 2-manifold is called weakly regular if it has a vertex-transitive automorphism group. Clearly, a weakly regular combinatorial 2-manifold is degree-regular and a degree-regular combinatorial 2-manifold of Euler characteristic - 2 must contain 12 vertices. In 1982, McMullen et al. constructed a 12-vertex geometrically realized triangulation of the double-torus in $\RR^3$. As an abstract simplicial complex, this triangulation is a weakly regular combinatorial 2-man…
Crane and Frenkel proposed a state sum invariant for triangulated 4-manifolds.They defined and used new algebraic structures called Hopf categories for their construction. Crane and Yetter studied Hopf categories and gave some examples using group cocycles that are associated to the Drinfeld double of a finite group. In this paper we define a state sum invariant of triangulated 4-manifolds using Crane-Yetter cocycles as Boltzmann weights. Our invariant generalizes the 3-dimensional invariants defined by Dijkgraaf and Witten and the invariants that are defined via Hopf algebras. We present diag…
