Symmetry is ubiquitous in nature. A group is a mathematical tool that captures this symmetry through motion. For example, a square can be rotated by 90 degrees or reflected top to bottom without its appearance being altered. By repeating this process of rotation and reflection, we obtain eight symmetry-preserving motions. The collection of these motions is an example of a group. Objects with the most symmetry are those with the biggest groups, and such objects are surprisingly rare. Amazingly, this rarity means it is often feasible to list all of these objects. By doing so, we seek to understand the very essence of symmetry.
My research is focused on objects called partial linear spaces (PLS). A PLS consists of a collection of points and a collection of lines, where each line can be thought of as a collection of points for which two conditions hold: each pair of points lies in at most one line, and each line contains at least two points. A network or graph is a PLS where every line contains exactly two points. For example, we get a graph by taking the points to be the cities in a country and connecting two cities by a line when there is a train service between them. Another example of a graph is the square, which has four points (the corners) and four lines (the edges).
My programme of research concerns PLS for which local symmetries always arise from global ones. Mathematically, a graph is homogeneous if it has this property: whenever two subgraphs (i.e. sections of the graph) are isomorphic (i.e. look the same), there is a motion taking the points of one part to the other. The graphs that are homogeneous are extremely rare and have all been identified, but what if we only care about the subgraphs with some specified structure, say those appearing in a collection X? We call this symmetry property X-homogeneity. As we vary the possibilities for X, can we still enumerate the X-homogeneous graphs? And can we also do this for all PLS, not just graphs?
I have two long-term research goals to answer these questions. The first is to understand C-homogeneous PLS where C is the collection of connected PLS (i.e. for any two points, there is a chain of lines connecting them). This leads to two research objectives. Objective 1 is to enumerate the C-homogeneous PLS. Objective 2 is to prove my conjecture that every C5-homogeneous graph containing squares but not triangles is in fact C-homogeneous, where C5 is the collection of connected graphs with at most 5 points.
My second long-term goal is to understand groups with small rank. The rank of the group H of a PLS is the number of types you get when you sort all pairs of points into collections of things that can be morphed into one another by H; these types are called orbits. For example, if the collection X contains the 3 graphs with at most 2 points, then the group of any X-homogeneous graph has rank 3, with these 3 orbits: pairs of points that are the same, pairs of points on a line, and pairs of points not on a line. The rank 3 groups are well understood, but groups of rank 4 or 5 are not. This leads to two research objectives. Objective 3 is to classify groups with rank at most 5. Objective 4 is to use this classification to investigate PLS with rank 4 groups.
Through this research, we now have a much better understanding of the symmetries of X-homogeneous PLS. I successfully proved my conjecture for Objective 2, and I am on track to complete my classification for Objective 1; surprisingly, my research indicates that there are very few families of C-homogeneous PLS. This shows that taking X to consist of connected structures is quite powerful. In contrast, for Objectives 3 and 4, I have discovered many new structures, showing that low rank is a fruitful avenue of study. For Objective 3, I am on track to complete my classification. Objective 4 turned out to be very challenging, so I completed a classification of the PLS with rank 3 groups (up to certain exceptions), an important first step towards understanding those with rank 4.
