Book Description

This article investigates structural, geometrical, and topological characteri-zations and properties of weakly modular graphs and of cell complexes derived from them. The unifying themes of our investigation are various “nonpositive cur-vature” and “local-to-global” properties and characterizations of weakly modular graphs and their subclasses. Weakly modular graphs have been introduced as a far-reaching common generalization of median graphs (and more generally, of mod-ular and orientable modular graphs), Helly graphs, bridged graphs, and dual polar graphs occurring under different disguises (1–skeletons, collinearity graphs, covering graphs, domains, etc.) in several seemingly-unrelated fields of mathematics: * Metric graph theory * Geometric group theory * Incidence geometries and buildings * Theoretical computer science and combinatorial optimization We give a local-to-global characterization of weakly modular graphs and their sub-classes in terms of simple connectedness of associated triangle-square complexes and specific local combinatorial conditions. In particular, we revisit characterizations of dual polar graphs by Cameron and by Brouwer-Cohen. We also show that (disk-)Helly graphs are precisely the clique-Helly graphs with simply connected clique complexes. With l1–embeddable weakly modular and sweakly modular graphs we associate high-dimensional cell complexes, having several strong topological and geometrical properties (contractibility and the CAT(0) property). Their cells have a specific structure: they are basis polyhedra of even 􀀁–matroids in the first case and orthoscheme complexes of gated dual polar subgraphs in the second case. We resolve some open problems concerning subclasses of weakly modular graphs: we prove a Brady-McCammond conjecture about CAT(0) metric on the orthoscheme.