On the diffeomorphic type of the complement to a line arrangement in a projective plane (Q424101)

In the paper under review, the incidence matrix associated to a line arrangement is defined. Two line arrangements are combinatorially equivalent if their incidence matrices are the same up to permutations in rows and columns. The parameter variety of a line arrangement \(\mathcal{L}\), viewed as a subvariety of \(({\hat{\mathbb{P}}}{}^2)^n\setminus \tilde{\Delta}\), consists of line arrangements combinatorially equivalent to \(\mathcal{L}\). The authors discover three gluing operations on line arrangements such that the parameter variety of the derived line arrangement under the gluing operations is irreducible if the parameter varieties of the contributing arrangements are irreducible. As a corollary, the authors prove that the parameter variety of a line arrangement is irreducible if each line passes through at most two multiple points of multiplicities greater than \(2\). Another corollary is an alternative proof of the main result of [\textit{T. Jiang} and \textit{S. S.-T. Yau}, Compos. Math. 92, No. 2, 133--155 (1994; Zbl 0828.57018)].