Michael Chapman

New York University | NYU · Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences

This paper, and its companion [BCLV24], are devoted to a negative resolution of the Aldous--Lyons Conjecture [AL07, Ald07]. In this part we study tailored non-local games. This is a subclass of non-local games -- combinatorial objects which model certain experiments in quantum mechanics, as well as interactive proofs in complexity theory. Our main...

A long standing problem asks whether every group is sofic, i.e., can be separated by almost-homomorphisms to the symmetric group $Sym(n)$. Similar problems have been asked with respect to almost-homomorphisms to the unitary group $U(n)$, equipped with various norms. One of these problems has been solved for the first time in [De Chiffre, Gelbsky, L...

This paper, and its companion [BCV24], are devoted to a negative resolution of the Aldous--Lyons Conjecture [AL07, Ald07]. This conjecture, originated in probability theory, is well known (cf. [Gel18]) to be equivalent to the statement that every invariant random subgroup of the free group is co-sofic. We disprove this last statement. In this part...

Property testing has been a major area of research in computer science in the last three decades. By property testing we refer to an ensemble of problems, results and algorithms which enable to deduce global information about some data by only reading small random parts of it. In recent years, this theory found its way into group theory, mainly via...

This paper is motivated by recent developments in group stability, high dimensional expansion, local testability of error correcting codes and topological property testing. In Part I, we formulate and motivate three stability problems: • Homomorphism stability: Are almost homomorphisms close to homomorphisms? • Covering stability: Are almost cove...

We prove that every uniform approximate homomorphism from a discrete amenable group into a symmetric group is uniformly close to a homomorphism into a slightly larger symmetric group. That is, amenable groups are uniformly flexibly stable in permutations. This answers affirmatively a question of Kun and Thom and a slight variation of a question of...

The total-variation cutoff phenomenon has been conjectured to hold for simple random walk on all transitive expanders. However, very little is actually known regarding this conjecture, and cutoff on sparse graphs in general. In this paper we establish total-variation cutoff for simple random walk on Ramanujan complexes of type \widetilde{A}_{d} ( d...

Let G = (V, E) be a finite graph. For v ∈ V we denote by Gv the subgraph of G that is induced by v’s neighbor set. We say that G is (a,b)-regular for a>b> 0 integers, if G is a-regular and Gv is b-regular for every v ∈ V. Recent advances in PCP theory call for the construction of infinitely many (a,b)-regular expander graphs G that are expanders al...

We prove that every uniform approximate homomorphism from a discrete amenable group into a symmetric group is uniformly close to a homomorphism into a slightly larger symmetric group. That is, amenable groups are uniformly flexibly stable in permutations. This answers affirmatively a question of Kun and Thom and a slight variation of a question of...

The total-variation cutoff phenomenon has been conjectured to hold for simple random walk on all transitive expanders. However, very little is actually known regarding this conjecture, and cutoff on sparse graphs in general. In this paper we establish total-variation cutoff for simple random walk on Ramanujan complexes of type à d (d≥1). As a resul...

The total-variation cutoff phenomenon has been conjectured to hold for simple random walk on all transitive expanders. However, very little is actually known regarding this conjecture, and cutoff on sparse graphs in general. In this paper we establish total-variation cutoff for simple random walk on Ramanujan complexes of type $\widetilde{A}_{d}$ $...

Let $G=(V,E)$ be a finite graph. For $v\in V$ we denote by $G_v$ the subgraph of $G$ that is induced by $v$'s neighbor set. We say that $G$ is $(a,b)$-regular for $a>b>0$ integers, if $G$ is $a$-regular and $G_v$ is $b$-regular for every $v\in V$. Recent advances in PCP theory call for the construction of infinitely many $(a,b)$-regular expander gr...

We prove that the maximal dimension of a $p$-central subspace of the generic symbol $p$-algebra of prime degree $p$ is $p+1$. We do it by proving the following number theoretic fact: let $\{s_1,\dots,s_{p+1}\}$ be $p+1$ distinct nonzero elements in the additive group $G=(\mathbb{Z}/p \mathbb{Z}) \times (\mathbb{Z}/p \mathbb{Z})$; then every nonzero...

We prove that the maximal dimension of a $p$-central subspace of the generic symbol $p$-algebra of prime degree $p$ is $p+1$. We do it by proving the following number theoretic fact: let $\{s_1,\dots,s_{p+1}\}$ be $p+1$ distinct nonzero elements in the additive group $G=(\mathbb{Z}/p \mathbb{Z}) \times (\mathbb{Z}/p \mathbb{Z})$; then every nonzero...

We make a systematic study of filtrations of a free group F defined as products of powers of the lower central series of F. Under some assumptions on the exponents, we characterize these filtrations in terms of the group algebra, the Magnus algebra of non-commutative power series, and linear representations by upper-triangular unipotent matrices. T...

We make a systematic study of filtrations of a free group F defined as products of powers of the lower central series of F. Under some assumptions on the exponents, we characterize these filtrations in terms of the group algebra, the Magnus algebra of non-commutative power series, and linear representations by upper-triangular unipotent matrices. T...