Harish-Chandra vertices.
A new calculus of planar diagrams involving diagrammatics for biadjoint functors and degenerate affine Hecke algebras is introduced. The calculus leads to an additive monoidal category whose Grothendieck ring contains an integral form of the Heisenberg algebra in infinitely many variables. We construct bases of the vector spaces of morphisms between products of generating objects in this category.
We prove that the natural HNN-extensions of the fractional Fibonacci groups are the fundamental groups of high-dimensional knot complements. We also give some characterization and interpretation of these knots. In particular we show that some of them are 2-knots.
For closed oriented manifolds, we establish oriented homotopy invariance of higher signatures that come from the fundamental group of a large class of orientable -manifolds, including the “piecewise geometric” ones in the sense of Thurston. In particular, this class, that will be carefully described, is the class of all orientable -manifolds if the Thurston Geometrization Conjecture is true. In fact, for this type of groups, we show that the Baum-Connes Conjecture With Coefficients holds. The...