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Thesis (Honors)--College of William and Mary, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 33-34). Also available via the World Wide Web.

Thesis (doctoral)--Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, 1992. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [143]) and index.

Crystallographic complex reflection groups are generated by reflections about affine hyperplanes in complex space and stabilize a full rank lattice. These analogs of affine Weyl groups have infinite order and were classified by V.L. Popov in 1982. The classical Braid theorem (first established by E. Artin and E. Brieskorn) asserts that the Artin group of a reflection group (finite or affine Weyl) gives the fundamental group of regular orbits. In other words, the fundamental group of the space with reflecting hyperplanes removed has a presentation mimicking that of the Coxeter presentation; one need only remove relations giving generators finite order. N.V Dung used a semi-cell construction to prove the Braid theorem for affine Weyl groups. Malle conjectured that the Braid theorem holds for all crystallographic complex reflection groups after constructing Coxeter-like reflection presentations. We show how to extend Dung's ideas to crystallographic complex reflection groups and then extend the Braid theorem to some groups in the infinite family [G(r,p,n)]. The proof requires a new classification of crystallographic groups in the infinite family that fail the Steinberg theorem.

In his 1947 work "Theory of Braids" Emil Artin asked whether the braid group remained unchanged when one considered classes of braids under linkhomotopy, allowing each strand of a braid to pass through itself but not through other strands. We generalize Artin's question to string links over orientable surface M and show that under link-homotopy surface string links form a group PBn(M), which is isomorphic to a quotient of the surface pure braid group PBn(M). Surface braid groups and their properties are an area of active research by González-Meneses, Paris and Rolfsen, Goçalves and Guaschi, and our work explores the geometric and visual beauty of this subject. We compute a presentation of PBn(M) in terms of the generators and relations and discuss the orderability of the group in the case when the surface in question is a unit disk D.

In his 1947 work "Theory of Braids" Emil Artin asked whether the braid group remained unchanged when one considered classes of braids under linkhomotopy, allowing each strand of a braid to pass through itself but not through other strands. We generalize Artin's question to string links over orientable surface M and show that under link-homotopy surface string links form a group PBn(M), which is isomorphic to a quotient of the surface pure braid group PBn(M). Surface braid groups and their properties are an area of active research by González-Meneses, Paris and Rolfsen, Goçalves and Guaschi, and our work explores the geometric and visual beauty of this subject. We compute a presentation of PBn(M) in terms of the generators and relations and discuss the orderability of the group in the case when the surface in question is a unit disk D.

In his 1947 work "Theory of Braids" Emil Artin asked whether the braid group remained unchanged when one considered classes of braids under linkhomotopy, allowing each strand of a braid to pass through itself but not through other strands. We generalize Artin's question to string links over orientable surface M and show that under link-homotopy surface string links form a group PBn(M), which is isomorphic to a quotient of the surface pure braid group PBn(M). Surface braid groups and their properties are an area of active research by González-Meneses, Paris and Rolfsen, Goçalves and Guaschi, and our work explores the geometric and visual beauty of this subject. We compute a presentation of PBn(M) in terms of the generators and relations and discuss the orderability of the group in the case when the surface in question is a unit disk D. / Science, Faculty of / Mathematics, Department of / Graduate

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PhD / None.