Monday, April 7th, 2008
2:30pm - 3:55pm, in Science 2-065

Daniel Matei

IMAR, Bucharest, Romania

Artin groups, Bestvina-Brady groups and Algebraic Hypersurfaces

Abstract: The Artin group A associated to a labeled simplicial graph G is the group with the following presentation: one generator for each vertex v in V, and one relation for each edge e=vw in E, namely vwv...=wvw..., where each side has length the label of edge e. A Bestvina-Brady N associated to G is the kernel of an epimorphism from A to the integers. In this talk we will discuss which Artin and Bestvina-Brady groups are fundamental groups of complements to projective algebraic hypersurfaces.