COMPUTATIONAL APPROACHES TO PL-MANIFOLDS CLASSIFICATION VIA CRYSTALLIZATION THEORY

Maria Rita CASALI (Universita' di Modena e Reggio Emilia)


Crystallization theory is a graph-theoretical representation method for compact
PL-manifolds of arbitrary dimension, with or without boundary, which makes use of a
particular class of edge-coloured graphs, encoding coloured triangulations.

One of the principal features of crystallization theory relies on the purely
combinatorial nature of the representing objects, which makes them particularly suitable
for computer manipulation.

This talk gives a brief account on the development of the theory, pointing the attention
merely on recent computational approaches to PL-manifolds classification, via coloured
graphs, and related results.