| LIE GROUPS, REPRESENTATIONS AND DISCRETE MATH | |
| Topic: | Paley Graphs and the Combinatorial Topology of the Bruhat Decomposition |
| Speaker: | Ron Livnè |
| Affiliation: | IAS |
| Date: | Tuesday, January 31 |
| Time/Room: | 2:00pm - 3:15pm/S-101 |
Paley graphs are well-known combinatorial objects which have many interesting properties. Many of these properties come from their symmetry under the automorphisms x-->ax+b of the affine line over a finite field F with q elements (q=4m+1).
We construct new simplicial complexes attached to certain groups, concentrating on G=PGL(2,F_q) for any finite field F. For every divisor d of q-1 we construct a "small" 2-dimensional complex with G-action. In a special case, the star of each vertex is a Paley graph. When d dereases from q to 1 the fundamental groups of the complexes give free, surface, property T, building, and finally simply connected complexes (this uses the Weil bounds for the number of points on curves over a finite field)