Convex decomposition spaces and Crapo complementation formula
Abstract
We establish a Crapo complementation formula for the M\"obius function in a general decomposition space in terms of a convex subspace and its complement: . We work at the objective level, meaning that the formula is an explicit homotopy equivalence of -groupoids. Almost all arguments are formulated in terms of (homotopy) pullbacks. Under suitable finiteness conditions on , one can take homotopy cardinality to obtain a formula in the incidence algebra at the level of -algebras. When is the nerve of a locally finite poset, this recovers the Bj\"orner--Walker formula, which in turn specialises to the original Crapo complementation formula when the poset is a finite lattice. A substantial part of the work is to introduce and develop the notion of convexity for decomposition spaces, which in turn requires some general preparation in decomposition-space theory, notably some results on reduced covers and ikeo and semi-ikeo maps. These results may be of wider interest. Once this is set up, the objective proof of the Crapo formula is quite similar to that of Bj\"orner--Walker.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2409.03742,
title = {Convex decomposition spaces and Crapo complementation formula},
author = {Imma Gálvez-Carrillo and Joachim Kock and Andrew Tonks},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.03742},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
24pp