Recently, the first named author defined a 2-parametric family of groups [Formula: see text] [V. O. Manturov, Non–reidemeister knot theory and its applications in dynamical systems, geometry and topology, preprint (2015), arXiv:1501.05208]. Those groups may be regarded as analogues of braid groups. Study of the connection between the groups [Formula: see text] and dynamical systems led to the discovery of the following fundamental principle: “If dynamical systems describing the motion of [Formula: see text] particles possess a nice codimension one property governed by exactly [Formula: see text] particles, then these dynamical systems admit a topological invariant valued in [Formula: see text]”. The [Formula: see text] groups have connections to different algebraic structures, Coxeter groups, Kirillov-Fomin algebras, and cluster algebras, to name three. Study of the [Formula: see text] groups led to, in particular, the construction of invariants, valued in free products of cyclic groups. All generators of the [Formula: see text] groups are reflections which make them similar to Coxeter groups and not to braid groups. Nevertheless, there are many ways to enhance [Formula: see text] groups to get rid of this [Formula: see text]-torsion. Later the first and the fourth named authors introduced and studied the second family of groups, denoted by [Formula: see text], which are closely related to triangulations of manifolds. The spaces of triangulations of a given manifolds have been widely studied. The celebrated theorem of Pachner [P.L. homeomorphic manifolds are equivalent by elementary shellings, Europ. J. Combin. 12(2) (1991) 129–145] says that any two triangulations of a given manifold can be connected by a sequence of bistellar moves or Pachner moves. See also [I. M. Gelfand, M. M. Kapranov and A. V. Zelevinsky, Discriminants, Resultants, and Multidimensional Determinants (Birkhäuser, Boston, 1994); A. Nabutovsky, Fundamental group and contractible closed geodesics, Comm. Pure Appl. Math. 49(12) (1996) 1257–1270]; the [Formula: see text] naturally appear when considering the set of triangulations with the fixed number of points. There are two ways of introducing the groups [Formula: see text]: the geometrical one, which depends on the metric, and the topological one. The second one can be thought of as a “braid group” of the manifold and, by definition, is an invariant of the topological type of manifold; in a similar way, one can construct the smooth version. In this paper, we give a survey of the ideas lying in the foundation of the [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] theories and give an overview of recent results in the study of those groups, manifolds, dynamical systems, knot and braid theories.
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