Pedro V. Silva – författare

This self-contained monograph explores a new theory centered around boolean representations of simplicial complexes leading to a new class of complexes featuring matroids as central to the theory. The book illustrates these new tools to study the classical theory of matroids as well as their important geometric connections. Moreover, many geometric and topological features of the theory of matroids find their counterparts in this extended context. Graduate students and researchers working in the areas of combinatorics, geometry, topology, algebra and lattice theory will find this monograph appealing due to the wide range of new problems raised by the theory. Combinatorialists will find this extension of the theory of matroids useful as it opens new lines of research within and beyond matroids. The geometric features and geometric/topological applications will appeal to geometers. Topologists who desire to perform algebraic topology computations will appreciate the algorithmic potential of boolean representable complexes.

This volume presents the lecture notes from the authors’ three summer courses offered during the program “Automorphisms of Free Groups: Geometry, Topology, and Dynamics,” held at the Centre de Recerca Matemàtica (CRM) in Bellaterra, Spain.

The first two chapters present the basic tools needed, from formal language theory (regular and context-free languages, automata, rewriting systems, transducers, etc) and emphasize their connections to group theory, mostly relating to free and virtually-free groups. The material covered is sufficient to present full proofs of many of the existing interesting characterizations of virtually-free groups. In turn, the last chapter comprehensively describes Bonahon’s construction of Thurston’s compactification of Teichmüller space in terms of geodesic currents on surfaces. It also includes several intriguing extensions of the notion of geodesic current to various other, more general settings.