Sunday, 12 June 2011

knot theory - Is the 4x5 chessboard complex a link complement?

The 2x3 and 3x4 chessboard complexes (form a square grid of vertices and make a simplex for any set of vertices no two of which are in the same row or column) are a 6-cycle and a triangulated torus with 24 triangles, respectively. The 4x5 chessboard complex is only a pseudomanifold — each vertex has the 3x4 torus as its link, rather than a spherical link that a proper manifold would have — but if you delete its 20 vertices you get a bona-fide cusped hyperbolic 3-manifold, triangulated by 120 regular ideal tetrahedra. It sort of looks like the kind of manifold you might get as the complement of a 20-component link in Euclidean space. Is it a link complement? And if so, which link is it the complement of?



Edit: here are a couple of general references on chessboard complexes.



Ziegler, G. M. (1994). Shellability of chessboard complexes. Israel J. Math. 87: 97–110.



Björner, A.; Lovász, L.; Vrecica, S. T.; Zivaljevic, R. T. (1994). Chessboard complexes and matching complexes. J. London Math. Soc. 49: 25–39.



They also have important applications to the proof of colored Tverberg theorems in discrete geometry: see, e.g.



Pavle V. M. Blagojević, Benjamin Matschke, Günter M. Ziegler (2009). Optimal bounds for the colored Tverberg problem. arXiv:0910.4987.

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