A graph-theoretical representation of PL-manifolds -- a survey on crystallizations (Q1091639)

The paper is a survey of the techniques and results developed by M. Pezzana and his group. The keystone of the paper is the possibility of representing PL-manifolds of any dimension \(n\) by means of edge-colored (multi)-graphs regular of degree \(n+1\). Each vertex is associated to a ''curved'' \(n\)-simplex, and the edges, with their coloration, specify how simplices are glued together. Section 1 is devoted to the basic notions and to the construction of the (pseudo-) complex associated to a given graph. Here a crystallization is defined as a graph representing a closed connected PL-manifold, with the additional property of contractedness: each subgraph obtained by deleting all edges of a color is connected. In the same section are stated the existence theorem for crystallizations and a first extension to manifolds with boundary. Section 2 contains some characterizations of crystallizations among edge-colored graphs. In Section 3 the relation between the topology of a manifold and the combinatorics of a crystallization of it is examined; the items touched upon are: orientability, connected sums, fundamental group, homology, branched coverings, minimal atlases (this last notion is actually the one which gave rise to the whole theory). Section 4 defines the moves for crystallizations and states theorems on the equivalence (by finite sequences of such moves) of two crystallizations representing the same manifold. In Section 5 the notion of regular embedding of a regular edge-colored graph into a surface is introduced. This allows the definition, in Section 6, of the regular genus of a closed n-dimensional PL-manifold and the statement of some results: The equality with the classical genera in dimensions 2 and 3, some bounds for the regular genus, and the characterization of the n-spheres as the manifolds with vanishing regular genus. Section 7 gathers recent results and trends of the theory. The material is explicitly not original. An exhaustive bibliography completes the paper.