The structure of euclidean Artin groups

Abstract

The Coxeter groups that act geometrically on euclidean space have long been classified and presentations for the irreducible ones are encoded in the well-known extended Dynkin diagrams. The corresponding Artin groups are called euclidean Artin groups and, despite what one might naively expect, most of them have remained fundamentally mysterious for more than forty years. Recently, my coauthors and I have resolved several long-standing conjectures about these groups, proving for the first time that every irreducible euclidean Artin group is a torsion-free centerless group with a decidable word problem and a finite-dimensional classifying space. This article surveys our results and the techniques we use to prove them.