On the simple connectedness of hyperplane complements in dual polar spaces (Q998527)

Let \(\varDelta \) be a dual polar space of rank \(n\geq 4, H\) be a hyperplane of \(\varDelta \) and \(\varGamma := \varDelta \setminus H\) be the complement of \(H\) in \(\varDelta \). It is proved that, if all lines of \(\varDelta \) have more than three points, then \(\varGamma \) is simply connected. It is also shown how this theorem can be exploited to prove that certain families of hyperplanes of dual polar spaces, or all hyperplanes of certain dual polar spaces, arise from embeddings.