Related papers: Subdivisions, shellability, and collapsibility of …
We prove that the fundamental group of any integer homology 3-sphere different from the 3-sphere admits irreducible representations of its fundamental group in SL(2,C). For hyperbolic integer homology spheres this comes with the definition,…
Let L be a link in the 3-sphere that is in thin position but not in bridge position and let P be a thin level sphere. We generalize a result of Wu by giving a bound on the number of disjoint irreducible compressing disks that P can have,…
We prove that the space of circle packings consistent with a given triangulation on a surface of genus at least two is projectively rigid, so that a packing on a complex projective surface is not deformable within that complex projective…
A triangulation of a $3$-manifold can be shown to be homeomorphic to the $3$-sphere by describing a discrete Morse function on it with only two critical faces, that is, a sequence of elementary collapses from the triangulation with one…
The smooth rational homology cobordism group of rational homology three spheres, T, contains subgroups T_p generated by 3-manifolds with first homology p-torsion, where p is a prime. Rochlin's theorem and gauge theoretic methods show that…
A planar set $P$ is said to be cover-decomposable if there is a constant $k=k(P)$ such that every $k$-fold covering of the plane with translates of $P$ can be decomposed into two coverings. It is known that open convex polygons are…
We prove two results about transforming any convex polyhedron, modeled as a linkage L of its edges. First, if we subdivide each edge of L in half, then L can be continuously flattened into a plane. Second, if L is equilateral and we again…
It is known that we can always 3-triangulate (i.e. divide into tetrahedra) convex polyhedra but not always non-convex ones. Polyhedra topologically equivalent to sphere with $p$ handles, shortly $p$-toroids, could not be convex. So, it is…
A flip is a minimal move between two triangulations of a polytope. An open question is whether any two triangulations of the product of two simplices can be connected through a series of flips. This was proven in the case where one of the…
We generalize regular subdivisions (polyhedral complexes resulting from the projection of the lower faces of a polyhedron) introducing the class of recursively-regular subdivisions. Informally speaking, a recursively-regular subdivision is…
A split of a polytope is a (necessarily regular) subdivision with exactly two maximal cells. A polytope is totally splittable if each triangulation (without additional vertices) is a common refinement of splits. This paper establishes a…
An earlier paper describes a program to prove the Kepler conjecture on sphere packings. This paper carries out the second step of that program. A sphere packing leads to a decomposition of $R^3$ into polyhedra. The polyhedra are divided…
We analyze the topology and geometry of a polyhedron of dimension 2 according to the minimum size of a cover by PL collapsible polyhedra. We provide partial characterizations of the polyhedra of dimension 2 that can be decomposed as the…
We introduce a notion of Morse shellings (and tilings) on finite simplicial complexes which extends the classical one and its relation to discrete Morse theory.Skeletons and barycentric subdivisions of Morse shellable (or tileable)…
We prove that any finite polyhedral manifold in 3D can be continuously flattened into 2D while preserving intrinsic distances and avoiding crossings, answering a 19-year-old open problem, if we extend standard folding models to allow for…
We give a new elementary proof of the parallelizability of closed orientable 3-manifolds. We use as the main tool the fact that any such manifold admits a Heegaard splitting.
We report on the buckling and subsequent collapse of orthotropic elastic spherical shells under volume and pressure control. Going far beyond what is known for isotropic shells, a rich morphological phase space with three distinct regimes…
We derive a formula which is a lower bound on the dimension of trivariate splines on a tetrahedral partition which are continuously differentiable of order $r$ in large enough degree. While this formula may fail to be a lower bound on the…
Let G be a finitely generated linear group over a field of characteristic 0. Suppose that every solvable subgroup of G is polycyclic. Then the claim is made that any solvable subgroup of G is separable. This is proven for G=SL_n(Z).…
A spherical polyhedron surface is a triangulated surface obtained by isometric gluing of spherical triangles. For instance, the boundary of a generic convex polytope in the 3-sphere is a spherical polyhedron surface. This paper investigates…