English

The fundamental group of random 2-complexes

Group Theory 2011-05-11 v2 Geometric Topology Probability

Abstract

We study Linial-Meshulam random 2-complexes, which are two-dimensional analogues of Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi random graphs. We find the threshold for simple connectivity to be p = n^{-1/2}. This is in contrast to the threshold for vanishing of the first homology group, which was shown earlier by Linial and Meshulam to be p = 2 log(n)/n. We use a variant of Gromov's local-to-global theorem for linear isoperimetric inequalities to show that when p = O(n^{-1/2 -\epsilon}) the fundamental group is word hyperbolic. Along the way we classify the homotopy types of sparse 2-dimensional simplicial complexes and establish isoperimetric inequalities for such complexes.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1010.6043,
  title  = {The fundamental group of random 2-complexes},
  author = {Eric Babson and Christopher Hoffman and Matthew Kahle},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1010.6043},
  year   = {2011}
}

Comments

This article has been withdrawn by the author due to duplicate posting and can now be found at arXiv:0711.2704

R2 v1 2026-06-21T16:35:45.410Z