This paper illustrates the themes of the title in terms of: van Kampen type theorems for the fundamental groupoid; holonomy and monodromy groupoids; and higher homotopy groupoids. Interaction with work of the writer is explored.
It is known that, for a regular riemannian foliation on a compact manifold, the properties of its basic cohomology (non-vanishing of the top-dimensional group and Poincaré duality) and the tautness of the foliation are closely related. If we consider singular riemannian foliations, there is little or no relation between these properties. We present an example of a singular isometric flow for which the top-dimensional basic cohomology group is non-trivial, but the basic cohomology does not satisfy...
The goal of this paper is to provide foundations for a new way to classify and characterize fractals using methods of computational topology. The fractal dimension is a main characteristic of fractal-like objects, and has proved to be a very useful tool for applications. However, it does not fully characterize a fractal. We can obtain fractals with the same dimension that are quite different topologically. Motivated by techniques from shape theory and computational topology, we consider fractals...
We employ Massey products to find sharper lower bounds for the Schwarz genus of a fibration than those previously known. In particular we give examples of non-formal spaces X for which the topological complexity TC(X) (defined to be the genus of the free path fibration on X) is greater than the zero-divisors cup-length plus one.
We are interested in a topological realization of a family of pseudoreflection groups ; i.e. we are looking for topological spaces whose mod-p cohomology is isomorphic to the ring of invariants . Spaces of this type give partial answers to a problem of Steenrod, namely which polynomial algebras over can appear as the mod-p cohomology of a space. The family under consideration is given by pseudoreflection groups which are subgroups of the wreath product where q divides p - 1 and where p is...
This article aims to explore the theory of unstable attractors with topological tools. A short topological analysis of the isolating blocks for unstable attractors with no external explosions leads quickly to sharp results about their shapes and some hints on how Conley's index is related to stability. Then the setting is specialized to the case of flows in ℝⁿ, where unstable attractors are seen to be dynamically complex since they must have external explosions.
This work contains an extended version of a course given in Arrangements in Pyrénées. School on hyperplane arrangements and related topics held at Pau (France) in June 2012. In the first part, we recall the computation of the fundamental group of the complement of a line arrangement. In the second part, we deal with characteristic varieties of line arrangements focusing on two aspects: the relationship with the position of the singular points (relative to projective curves of some prescribed degrees)...