Let Delta_{n-1} denote the (n-1)-dimensional simplex. Let Y be a random k-dimensional subcomplex of Delta_{n-1} obtained by starting with the full (k-1)-dimensional skeleton of Delta_{n-1} and then adding each k-simplex independently with probability p. Let H_{k-1}(Y;R) denote the (k-1)-dimensional reduced homology group of Y with coefficients in a finite abelian group R. Let R and k \geq 1 be fixed. It is shown that p=(k \log n)/n is a sharp threshold for the vanishing of H_{k-1}(Y;R).
We consider simplicial complexes that are generated from the binomial random 3-uniform hypergraph by taking the downward-closure. We determine when this simplicial complex is homologically connected, meaning that its zero-th and first homology groups with coefficients in $\mathbb{F}_2$ vanish. Although this is not intrinsically a monotone property, we show that it nevertheless has a single sharp threshold, and indeed prove a hitting time result relating the connectedness to the disappearance of the last minimal obstruction.
We study the homology of random Čech complexes generated by a homogeneous Poisson process. We focus on 'homological connectivity' - the stage where the random complex is dense enough, so that its homology "stabilizes" and becomes isomorphic to that of the underlying topological space. Our results form a comprehensive high-dimensional analogue of well-known phenomena related to connectivity in the Erdős-Rényi graph and random geometric graphs. We first prove that there is a sharp phase transition describing homological connectivity. Next, we analyze the behavior of the complex in the critical w…
The paper studies the connectivity properties of facet graphs of simplicial complexes of combinatorial interest. In particular, it is shown that the facet graphs of $d$-cycles, $d$-hypertrees and $d$-hypercuts are, respectively, $(d+1)$, $d$, and $(n-d-1)$-vertex-connected. It is also shown that the facet graph of a $d$-cycle cannot be split into more than $s$ connected components by removing at most $s$ vertices. In addition, the paper discusses various related issues, as well as an extension to cell-complexes.
This paper verifies a conjecture of Edelman and Reiner regarding the homology of the $h$-complex of a Boolean algebra. A discrete Morse function with no low-dimensional critical cells is constructed, implying a lower bound on connectivity. This together with an Alexander duality result of Edelman and Reiner implies homology-vanishing also in high dimensions. Finally, possible generalizations to certain classes of supersolvable lattices are suggested.
Let Δbe a finite building (or, more generally, a thick spherical and locally finite building). The chamber graph G(Δ), whose edges are the pairs of adjacent chambers in Δ, is known to be q-regular for a certain number q=q(Δ). Our main result is that G(Δ) is q-connected in the sense of graph theory. Similar results are proved for the chamber graphs of Coxeter complexes and for order complexes of geometric lattices.
We introduce a version of discrete Morse theory for posets. This theory studies the topology of the order complexes K(X) of h-regular posets X from the critical points of admissible matchings on X. Our approach is related to R. Forman's discrete Morse theory for CW-complexes and generalizes Forman and Chari's results on the face posets of regular CW-complexes. We also introduce a homological variant of the theory that can be used to study the topology of triangulable homology manifolds by means of their order triangulations.
Following D.B. Karaguezian, V. Reiner, and M.L. Wachs (Matching Complexes, Bounded Degree Graph Complexes, and Weight Spaces of $GL$-Complexes, Journal of Algebra 2001) we study the connectivity degree and shellability of multiple chessboard complexes. Our central new results (Theorems 3.2 and 4.4) provide sharp connectivity bounds relevant to applications in Tverberg type problems where multiple points of the same color are permitted. These results also provide a foundation for the new results of Tverberg-van Kampen-Flores type, as announced in arXiv:1502.05290 [math.CO].
The paper surveys some new results and open problems connected with such fundamental combinatorial concepts as polytopes, simplicial complexes, cubical complexes, and subspace arrangements. Particular attention is paid to the case of simplicial and cubical subdivisions of manifolds and, especially, spheres. We describe important constructions which allow to study all these combinatorial objects by means of methods of commutative and homological algebra. The proposed approach to combinatorial problems relies on the theory of moment-angle complexes, currently being developed by the authors. The …
The Hom-complexes were introduced by Lovasz to study topological obstructions to graph colorings. It was conjectured by Babson and Kozlov, and proved by Cukic and Kozlov, that Hom(G,K_n) is (n-d-2)-connected, where d is the maximal degree of a vertex of G. We give a short proof of the conjecture.
The multiplicity conjecture of Herzog, Huneke, and Srinivasan is verified for the face rings of the following classes of simplicial complexes: matroid complexes, complexes of dimension one and two, and Gorenstein complexes of dimension at most four. The lower bound part of this conjecture is also established for the face rings of all doubly Cohen-Macaulay complexes whose 1-skeleton's connectivity does not exceed the codimension plus one as well as for all (d-1)-dimensional d-Cohen-Macaulay complexes. The main ingredient of the proofs is a new interpretation of the minimal shifts in the resolut…
We study the class of independence complexes of claw-free graphs. The main theorem give good bounds on the connectivity of these complexes, given bounds for a few subcomplexes of the same class. Two applications are presented. Firstly, we show that the independence complex of a claw-free graph with n vertices and maximal degree d is (cn/d+epsilon)-connected, where c=2/3. This can be compared with the result of Szabo and Tardos that c=1/2 is optimal with no restrictions on the graphs. Secondly, we calculate the connectivity of a family of complexes used in Babson and Kozlov's proof of Lovasz co…
We develop Morse-Bott theory on posets, generalizing both discrete Morse-Bott theory for regular complexes and Morse theory on posets. Moreover, we prove a Lusternik-Schnirelmann theorem for general matchings on posets, in particular, for Morse-Bott functions.
We study $d$-dimensional simplicial complexes that are PL embeddable in $\mathbb{R}^{d+1}$. It is shown that such a complex must satisfy a certain homological condition. The existence of this obstruction allows us to provide a systematic approach to deriving upper bounds for the number of top-dimensional faces of such complexes, particularly in low dimensions.
In this paper we discuss two general models of random simplicial complexes which we call the lower and the upper models. We show that these models are dual to each other with respect to combinatorial Alexander duality. The behaviour of the Betti numbers in the lower model is characterised by the notion of critical dimension, which was introduced by A. Costa and M. Farber: random simplicial complexes in the lower model are homologically approximated by a wedge of spheres of dimension equal the critical dimension. In this paper we study the Betti numbers in the upper model and introduce new noti…
In this paper we study the homology of a random Cech complex generated by a homogeneous Poisson process in a compact Riemannian manifold M. In particular, we focus on the phase transition for "homological connectivity" where the homology of the complex becomes isomorphic to that of M. The results presented in this paper are an important generalization of [7], from the flat torus to general compact Riemannian manifolds. In addition to proving the statements related to homological connectivity, the methods we develop in this paper can be used as a framework for translating results for random geo…
Let p be a prime and let A be a subset of F_p. For k<p let X_{A,k} be the (k-1)-dimensional complex on the vertex set F_p with a full (k-2)-skeleton whose (k-1)-faces are k-subsets S of F_p such that the sum of the elements of S belongs to A. The homology groups of X_{A,k} with field coefficients are determined. In particular it is shown that if |A| \leq k then H_{k-1}(X_{A,k};F_p)=0. This implies a homological characterization of uncertainty numbers of subsets of F_p.
For each finite simple graph $G$, Aharoni, Berger and Ziv consider a recursively defined number $ψ(G) \in \mathbb{Z}\cup \{+ \infty \}$ which gives a lower bound for the topological connectivity of the independence complex $I_G$. They conjecture that this bound is optimal for every graph. We use a result of recursion theory to give a short disproof of this claim.
A simplicial complex is $r$-conic if every subcomplex of at most $r$ vertices is contained in the star of a vertex. A $4$-conic complex is simply connected. We prove that an $8$-conic complex is $2$-connected. In general a $(2n+1)$-conic complex need not be $n$-connected but a $6^n$-conic complex is $n$-connected. This extends results by Even-Zohar, Farber and Mead on ample complexes and answers two questions raised in their paper. Our results together with theirs imply that the probability of a complex being $n$-connected tends to $1$ as the number of vertices tends to $\infty$. Our model her…
The main result of this paper is a proof of the following conjecture of Babson & Kozlov: Theorem. Let G be a graph of maximal valency d, then the complex Hom(G,K_n) is at least (n-d-2)-connected. Here Hom(-,-) denotes the polyhedral complex introduced by Lovász to study the topological lower bounds for chromatic numbers of graphs. We will also prove, as a corollary to the main theorem, that the complex Hom(C_{2r+1},K_n) is (n-4)-connected, for $n\geq 3$.
We introduce a model for random chain complexes over a finite field. The randomness in our complex comes from choosing the entries in the matrices that represent the boundary maps uniformly over $\mathbb{F}_q$, conditioned on ensuring that the composition of consecutive boundary maps is the zero map. We then investigate the combinatorial and homological properties of this random chain complex.
Let $Φ$ be a finite root system of rank $n$ and let $m$ be a nonnegative integer. The generalized cluster complex $Δ^m (Φ)$ was introduced by S. Fomin and N. Reading. It was conjectured by these authors that $Δ^m (Φ)$ is shellable and by V. Reiner that it is $(m+1)$-Cohen-Macaulay, in the sense of Baclawski. These statements are proved in this paper. Analogous statements are shown to hold for the positive part $Δ^m_+ (Φ)$ of $Δ^m (Φ)$. An explicit homotopy equivalence is given between $Δ^m_+ (Φ)$ and the poset of generalized noncrossing partitions, associated to the pair $(Φ, m)$ by D. Armstro…
The fundamental group of the $2$-dimensional Linial-Meshulam random simplicial complex $Y_2(n,p)$ was first studied by Babson, Hoffman and Kahle. They proved that the threshold probability for simple connectivity of $Y_2(n,p)$ is about $p\approx n^{-1/2}$. In this paper, we show that this threshold probability is at most $p\le (γn)^{-1/2}$, where $γ= 4^4/3^3$, and conjecture that this threshold is sharp. In fact, we show that $p=(γn)^{-1/2}$ is a sharp threshold probability for the stronger property that every cycle of length $3$ is the boundary of a subcomplex of $Y_2(n,p)$ that is homeomorph…
We prove that the topological connectivity of a graph homomorphism complex Hom($G,K_m$) is at least $m-D(G)-2$, where $\displaystyle D(G)=\max_{H\subseteq G}δ(H)$. This is a strong generalization of a theorem of Cukić and Kozlov, in which $D(G)$ is replaced by the maximum degree $Δ(G)$. It also generalizes the graph theoretic bound for chromatic number, $\displaystyleχ(G)\leq D(G)+1$, as $\displaystyleχ(G)=\min\{ m:\text{Hom}(G,K_m)\neq\varnothing\}$. Furthermore, we use this result to examine homological phase transitions in the random polyhedral complexes Hom$(G(n,p),K_m)$ when $p=c/n$ for a…
We study combinatorial connectivity for two models of random geometric complexes. These two models - Čech and Vietoris-Rips complexes - are built on a homogeneous Poisson point process of intensity $n$ on a $d$-dimensional torus using balls of radius $r_n$. In the former, the $k$-simplices/faces are formed by subsets of $(k+1)$ Poisson points such that the balls of radius $r_n$ centred at these points have a mutual interesection and in the latter, we require only a pairwise intersection of the balls. Given a (simplicial) complex (i.e., a collection of $k$-simplices for all $k \geq 1$), we can …
We relate homological properties of a binomial edge ideal $\mathcal{J}_G$ to invariants that measure the connectivity of a simple graph $G$. Specifically, we show if $R/\mathcal{J}_G$ is a Cohen-Macaulay ring, then graph toughness of $G$ is exactly $\frac{1}{2}$. We also give an inequality between the depth of $R/\mathcal{J}_G$ and the vertex-connectivity of $G$. In addition, we study the Hilbert-Samuel multiplicity, and the Hilbert-Kunz multiplicity of $R/\mathcal{J}_G$.
In this paper we study a pair of numerical parameters associated to a graph $G$. One the one hand, one can construct $\text{Hom}(K_2, G)$, a space of homomorphisms from a edge $K_2$ into $G$ and study its (topological) connectivity. This approach dates back to the neighborhood complexes introduced by Lovász in his proof of the Kneser conjecture. In another direction Brightwell and Winkler introduced a graph parameter called the warmth $ζ(G)$ of a graph $G$, based on asymptotic behavior of $d$-branching walks in $G$ and inspired by constructions in statistical physics. Both the warmth of $G$ an…
A matching complex of a simple graph $G$ is a simplicial complex with faces given by the matchings of $G$. The topology of matching complexes is mysterious; there are few graphs for which the homotopy type is known. Marietti and Testa showed that matching complexes of forests are contractible or homotopy equivalent to a wedge of spheres. We study two specific families of trees. For caterpillar graphs, we give explicit formulas for the number of spheres in each dimension and for perfect binary trees we find a strict connectivity bound. We also use a tool from discrete Morse theory called the \t…
The paper surveys recent progress in understanding geometric, topological and combinatorial properties of large simplicial complexes, focusing mainly on ampleness, connectivity and universality. In the first part of the paper we concentrate on $r$-ample simplicial complexes which are high dimensional analogues of the $r$-e.c. graphs introduced originally by Erd\H os and Réniy. The class of $r$-ample complexes is useful for applications since these complexes allow extensions of subcomplexes of certain type in all possible ways; besides, $r$-ample complexes exhibit remarkable robustness properti…
In 1983 Kalai proved an incredible generalisation of Cayley's formula for the number of trees on a labelled vertex set to a formula for a class of $r$-dimensional simplicial complexes. These simplicial complexes generalise trees by means of being homologically $\Bbb Q$-acyclic. In this text we consider a different generalisation of trees to the class of pure dimensional simplicial complexes that \textit{minimally connect a vertex set} (in the sense that the removal of any top dimensional face disconnects the complex). Our main result provides an upper and lower bound for the number of these mi…
