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Michi’s blog » archive for September, 2008

Cup products in simplicial cohomology

  • September 12th, 2008
  • 1:12 am

This post is a walkthrough through a computation I just did – and one of the main reasons I post it is for you to find and tell me what I’ve done wrong. I have a nagging feeling that the cup product just plain doesn’t work the way I tried to make it work, and since I’m trying to understand cup products, I’d appreciate any help anyone has.

I’ve picked out the examples I have in order to have two spaces with the same Betti numbers, but with different cohomological ring structure.

Sphere with two handles

I choose a triangulation of the sphere with two handles given the boundary of a tetrahedron spanned by the nodes a,b,c,d and the edges be, ef, bf and cg, ch, gh spanning two triangles.

We get a cochain complex on the form
0 \to \mathbb{Z}^8 \to \mathbb{Z}^{12} \to \mathbb{Z}^4 \to 0
with the codifferential given as
\begin{pmatrix} 1 & -1 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0\\ 1 & 0 & -1 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0\\ 1 & 0 & 0 & -1 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0\\ 0 & 1 & -1 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0\\ 0 & 1 & 0 & -1 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0\\ 0 & 1 & 0 & 0 & -1 & 0 & 0 & 0\\ 0 & 1 & 0 & 0 & 0 & -1 & 0 & 0\\ 0 & 0 & 1 & -1 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0\\ 0 & 0 & 1 & 0 & 0 & 0 & -1 & 0\\ 0 & 0 & 1 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & -1\\ 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 1 & -1 & 0 & 0\\ 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 1 & -1\\ \end{pmatrix}
and
\begin{pmatrix} 1 & -1 & 0 & 1 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 \\ 1 & 0 & -1 & 0 & 1 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & 1 & -1 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 1 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 0 & 1 & -1 & 0 & 0 & 1 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 \\ \end{pmatrix}

This is a preview of Cup products in simplicial cohomology. Read the full post (787 words, 36 images)