On piecewise linear cell decompositions

Abstract

In this note, we introduce a class of cell decompositions of PL manifolds and polyhedra which are more general than triangulations yet not as general as CW complexes; we propose calling them PLCW complexes. The main result is an analog of Alexander's theorem: any two PLCW decompositions of the same polyhedron can be obtained from each other by a sequence of certain "elementary" moves. This definition is motivated by the needs of Topological Quantum Field Theory, especially extended theories as defined by Lurie.

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References in corpus (1)

• Turaev-Viro invariants as an extended TQFT

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