arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Susan Hermiller.
We study the 4-move invariant \crl\ for links in the 3-sphere developed by Dabkowski and Sahi, which is defined as a quotient of the fundamental group of the link complement. We develop techniques for computing this invariant and show that for several classes of knots it is equal to the invariant for the unknot; therefore, in these cases the invariant cannot detect a counterexample to the 4-move conjecture.
In this paper we introduce the geodesic conjugacy language and geodesic conjugacy growth series for a finitely generated group. We study the effects of various group constructions on rationality of both the geodesic conjugacy growth series and spherical conjugacy growth series, as well as on regularity of the geodesic conjugacy language and spherical conjugacy language. In particular, we show that regularity of the geodesic conjugacy language is preserved by the graph product construction, and rationality of the geodesic conjugacy growth series is preserved by both direct and free products.
We introduce a combinatorial property for finitely generated groups called stackable that implies the existence of an inductive procedure for constructing van Kampen diagrams with respect to a canonical finite presentation. We also define algorithmically stackable groups, for which this procedure is an effective algorithm. This property gives a common model for algorithms arising from both rewriting systems and almost convexity for groups. We also introduce a new pair of asymptotic invariants that are filling inequalities refining the notions of intrinsic and extrinsic diameter inequalities for finitely presented groups. These tame filling inequalities are quasi-isometry invariants, up to Lipschitz equivalence of functions (and, in the case of the intrinsic tame filling inequality, up to choice of a sufficiently large set of defining relators). We show that radial tameness functions are equivalent to the extrinsic tame filling inequality condition, and so intrinsic tame filling inequalities can be viewed as the intrinsic analog of radial tameness functions. We discuss both intrinsic and extrinsic tame filling inequalities for many examples of stackable groups, including groups with a finite complete rewriting system, Thompson's group F, Baumslag-Solitar groups and their iterates, and almost convex groups. We show that the fundamental group of any closed 3-manifold with a uniform geometry is algorithmically stackable using a regular language of normal forms.
We give the first examples of groups which admit a tame combing with linear radial tameness function with respect to any choice of finite presentation, but which are not minimally almost convex on a standard generating set. Namely, we explicitly construct such combings for Thompson's group F and the Baumslag-Solitar groups BS(1, p) with p \ge 3. In order to make this construction for Thompson's group F, we significantly expand the understanding of the Cayley complex of this group with respect to the standard finite presentation. In particular we describe a quasigeodesic set of normal forms and combinatorially classify the arrangements of 2-cells adjacent to edges that do not lie on normal form paths.
We study a class of inverse monoids of the form M = Inv< X | w=1 >, where the single relator w has a combinatorial property that we call sparse. For a sparse word w, we prove that the word problem for M is decidable. We also show that the set of words in (X \cup X^{-1})^* that represent the identity in M is a deterministic context free language, and that the set of geodesics in the Schutzenberger graph of the identity of M is a regular language.
We show that every right-angled Artin group AG defined by a graph G of finite chromatic number is poly-free with poly-free length bounded between the clique number and the chromatic number of G. Further, a characterization of all right-angled Artin groups of poly-free length 2 is given, namely the group AG has poly-free length 2 if and only if there exists an independent set of vertices D in G such that every cycle in G meets D at least twice. Finally, it is shown that AG is a semidirect product of 2 free groups of finite rank if and only if G is a finite tree or a finite complete bipartite graph. All of the proofs of the existence of poly-free structures are constructive.
The fundamental groups of most (conjecturally, all) closed 3-manifolds with uniform geometries have finite complete rewriting systems. The fundamental groups of a large class of amalgams of circle bundles also have finite complete rewriting systems. The general case remains open.