arXiv research

The fundamental group of the complement of a hyperplane arrangement plays an important role in studying the corresponding arrangements. In particular, for large families of hyperplane arrangements, this fundamental group, being isomorphic to the fundamental group of a complement of a line arrangement, has some remarkab…

Proves incoherence of free-by-free and surface-by-free groups, solving two problems.

Study surfaces with free product fundamental groups, proving existence and properties.

The fundamental group of the complement of a plane curve is a very important topological invariant. In particular, it is interesting to find out whether this group is determined by the combinatorics of the curve or not, and whether it is a direct sum of free groups and a free abelian group, or it has a conjugation-free…

The paper studies fundamental groups of orbit configuration spaces and proves their torsion-freeness.

We classify compact oriented $5$-manifolds with free fundamental group and $π_{2}$ a torsion free abelian group in terms of the second homotopy group considered as $π_1$-module, the cup product on the second cohomology of the universal covering, and the second Stiefel-Whitney class of the universal covering. We apply t…

In this paper we first state the classification of the prolongations of complex free fundamental graded Lie algebras. Next we introduce the notion of free pseudo-product fundamental graded Lie algebras and study the prolongations of complex free pseudo-product fundamental graded Lie algebras. Furthermore we investigate…

Consider a one-ended word-hyperbolic group. If it is the fundamental group of a graph of free groups with cyclic edge groups then either it is the fundamental group of a surface or it contains a finitely generated one-ended subgroup of infinite index. As a corollary, the same holds for limit groups. We also obtain a ch…

The paper classifies PD_4-complexes based on their fundamental group properties.

In this note, we present a new method for computing fundamental groups of curve complements using a variation of the Zariski-Van Kampen method on general ruled surfaces. As an application we give an alternative (computation-free) proof for the fundamental group of generic $(p,q)$-torus curves.

Study torsion-free nilpotent fundamental groups of smooth varieties up to rank 7.

The paper finds small exotic 4-manifolds with free abelian groups.

Maps between automorphism groups are isomorphisms for free factor complexes.

Study on profinite rigidity of direct products of free and surface groups.

This paper is concerned with fixed-point free $S^1$-actions (smooth or locally linear) on orientable 4-manifolds. We show that the fundamental group plays a predominant role in the equivariant classification of such 4-manifolds. In particular, it is shown that for any finitely presented group with infinite center, ther…

Let M be a Riemannian n-manifold with n greater than or equal to 3. For k between 1 and n, we say M has k-positive Ricci curvature if at every point of M the sum of any k eigenvalues of the Ricci curvature is strictly positive. In particular, one positive Ricci curvature is equivalent to positive Ricci curvature and n-…

Crooked planes are piecewise linear surfaces that were introduced by Drumm in the early 1990s to construct fundamental domains for properly discontinuous actions of free groups on Minkowski 3-space. In a previous paper, we introduced analogues of these surfaces, called AdS crooked planes, in the 3-dimensional anti-de S…

We introduce the notion of a conjugation-free geometric presentation for a fundamental group of a line arrangement's complement, and we show that the fundamental groups of the following family of arrangements have a conjugation-free geometric presentation: A real arrangement L, whose graph of multiple points is a union…

We classify those compact 3-manifolds with incompressible toral boundary whose fundamental groups are residually free. For example, if such a manifold $M$ is prime and orientable and the fundamental group of $M$ is non-trivial then $M \cong Σ\times S^1$, where $Σ$ is a surface.

The paper proves residual finiteness of certain lattices and constructs surfaces with specific fundamental groups.

Our goal is to better understand the relationship between the polyhedron and the group associated with a fundamental domain in H^3. In this paper, we will study torsion-free groups and determine a formula for how many edge classes a given abstract polyhedron must have. We will use that result to classify all fundamenta…

We define an integer-valued invariant of special cube complexes called the genus, and prove that having genus one characterizes special cube complexes with abelian fundamental group. Using the genus, we obtain a new proof that the fundamental group of a special cube complex is either free abelian or surjects onto a non…

A nontrivial element in a group is a generalized torsion element if some nonempty finite product of its conjugates is the identity. We prove that any generalized torsion element in a free product of torsion-free groups is conjugate to a generalized torsion element in some factor group. This implies that the fundamental…

The fundamental group of the Menger universal curve is uncountable and not free, although all of its finitely generated subgroups are free. It contains an isomorphic copy of the fundamental group of every one-dimensional separable metric space and an isomorphic copy of the fundamental group of every planar Peano contin…

It is proved that every disconnected surface-link with meridian-based free fundamental group is a trivial (i.e., an unknotted-unlinked) surface-link. This result is a surface-link version of the author's recent announcement result on smooth unknotting of a surface-knot.

In 1992, David Wright proved a remarkable theorem about which contractible open manifolds are covering spaces. He showed that if a one-ended open manifold M has pro-monomorphic fundamental group at infinity which is not pro-trivial and is not stably Z, then M does not cover any manifold (except itself). In the non-mani…

Kwai Man Fan proved that if the intersection lattice of a line arrangement does not contain a cycle, then the fundamental group of its complement is a direct sum of infinite and cyclic free groups. He also conjectured that the converse is true as well. The main purpose of this paper is to prove this conjecture

We study subgroups of fundamental groups of real analytic closed 4-manifolds with nonpositive sectional curvature. In particular, we are interested in the following question: if a subgroup of the fundamental group is not virtually free abelian, does it contain a free group of rank two ? The technique involves the theor…

The study finds stably free modules and distinct 2-complexes for large ranks.

Study classifies 3-manifolds with constant Ricci eigenvalues.

We give various estimates of the minimal number of self-intersections of a nontrivial element of the kth term of the lower central series and derived series of the fundamental group of a surface. As an application, we obtain a new topological proof of the fact that free groups and fundamental groups of closed surfaces …

We show that the fundamental group of the complement of an arrangement of complex lines in the complex plane is a free group if and only if the arrangement is a union of parallel lines.

We study monoids generated by Zariski-van Kampen generators in the 17 fundamental groups of the complement of logarithmic free divisors in C^3 listed by Sekiguchi (Theorem 1). Five of them are Artin monoids and eight of them are free abelian monoids. The remaining four monoids are not Gaussian and, hence, are neither G…

The validity of Freedman's disk theorem is known to depend only on the fundamental group. It was conjectured that it fails for nonabelian free fundamental groups. If this were true then surgery theory would work in dimension four. Recently, Krushkal and Lee proved a surprising result that surgery theory works for a lar…

Even though the disk embedding theorem is not available in dimension 4 for free fundamental groups, some surgery problems may be shown to have topological solutions. We prove that surgery problems may be solved if one considers closed 4-manifolds and the intersection pairing is extended from the integers, and prove a r…

Recall that a group is called large if it has a finite index subgroup which surjects onto a non-abelian free group. By work of Agol and Cooper-Long-Reid, most 3-manifold groups are large; in particular, the fundamental groups of hyperbolic 3-manifolds are large. In previous work, the first author gave examples of close…

Turaev conjectured that the classification, realization and splitting results for Poincaré duality complexes of dimension $3$ (PD$_{3}$-complexes) generalize to PD$_{n}$-complexes with $(n-2)$-connected universal cover for $n \ge 3$. Baues and Bleile showed that such complexes are classified, up to oriented homotopy eq…

New criterion for bi-ordering free groups under automorphisms.

Sela proved every torsion-free one-ended hyperbolic group is coHopfian. We prove that there exist torsion-free one-ended hyperbolic groups that are not commensurably coHopfian. In particular, we show that the fundamental group of every simple surface amalgam is not commensurably coHopfian.

New methods reveal rare epimorphisms linking 3-manifold groups to free groups.

Proves graph 3-manifold groups have two specific properties.

We prove that the profinite completion of the fundamental group of a compact 3-manifold $M$ satisfies a Tits alternative: if a closed subgroup $H$ does not contain a free pro-$p$ subgroup for any $p$, then $H$ is virtually soluble, and furthermore of a very particular form. In particular, the profinite completion of th…

The study shows that surface groups are the only non-free infinite index subgroups of certain hyperbolic groups.

Study shows complex K3 surfaces have infinite free abelian subgroup in their diffeomorphism group.

We show that stable commutator length is rational on free products of free Abelian groups amalgamated over $\mathbb{Z}^k$, a class of groups containing the fundamental groups of all torus knot complements. We consider a geometric model for these groups and parameterize all surfaces with specified boundary mapping to th…

The Cartesian subgroup in graph products of groups is studied with bounds and algorithms.

We show that the fundamental group of the space of ordered affine-equivalent configurations of at least five points in the real plane is isomorphic to the pure braid group modulo its centre. In the case of four points this fundamental group is free with eleven generators.

In this short note we survey some results about the fundamental group of a compact negatively curved manifold. In particular, we review a theorem of Gusevskij, it states that the fundamental group of a compact negatively curved manifold does not belong to $\mathcal{C},$ where $\mathcal{C}$ is the smallest class of grou…