Graph complexes from the geometric viewpoint

Abstract

These notes loosely follow an introductory course on graph complexes, held at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in summer 23. Instead of simply typing up my lecture notes I decided to give here an overview over (parts of) the topic (lecture notes can be found on my homepage). We introduce the associative, commutative and Lie graph complexes, and moduli spaces of metric graphs, then discuss how the commutative and Lie graph complexes can be interpreted as cellular chain complexes associated to certain (pairs of) subspaces of the latter, both for ``even" and ``odd" orientations. We explain why this does not work for the associative complex and how to adjust the space of graphs to deal with this case. Along the way we highlight how algebraic properties on one side translate into geometric statements on the other.

arXiv commentComments are welcome! 37 pages, 10 figures