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edited the question to include it in body and add necessary condition
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YCor
YCor
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Does every triangulable manifold have a vertex-transitive triangulation?

Does every triangulable manifold have a vertex-transitive triangulation?

When I talk about a vertex-transitive triangulation of a manifold, I mean in the sense of realizing a manifold homeomorphically as a simplicial complex such that the automorphism group of the simplicial complex is transitive on the vertices or 0-simplexes of the complex. This could also be formulated for other categories, like the category of simplicial sets, or the category of maps on surfaces (once you define G-actions suitably) but we'll stick with graphs and simplicial complexes here.

Two of the reasons I was interested in this problem is the work that's been done on local computability of characteristic classes of manifolds by Gelfand and others, as well as the conjecture of Kahn, Saks and Sturtevant on vertex transitive nonevasive complexes.

I'm surprised no one has really raised the question in print before, to my knowledge. Once, I thought I had an idea for a proof that some 2-manifolds can't be suitably triangulated, by focusing on surfaces which can't be realized suitably by regular maps (or flag transitive triangulations) and showing some of these surfaces can't be vertex transitively triangulated in any other way. I hope to return to this and complete the details sometime soon.

Does every manifold have a vertex-transitive triangulation?

When I talk about a vertex-transitive triangulation of a manifold, I mean in the sense of realizing a manifold homeomorphically as a simplicial complex such that the automorphism group of the simplicial complex is transitive on the vertices or 0-simplexes of the complex. This could also be formulated for other categories, like the category of simplicial sets, or the category of maps on surfaces (once you define G-actions suitably) but we'll stick with graphs and simplicial complexes here.

Two of the reasons I was interested in this problem is the work that's been done on local computability of characteristic classes of manifolds by Gelfand and others, as well as the conjecture of Kahn, Saks and Sturtevant on vertex transitive nonevasive complexes.

I'm surprised no one has really raised the question in print before, to my knowledge. Once, I thought I had an idea for a proof that some 2-manifolds can't be suitably triangulated, by focusing on surfaces which can't be realized suitably by regular maps (or flag transitive triangulations) and showing some of these surfaces can't be vertex transitively triangulated in any other way. I hope to return to this and complete the details sometime soon.

Does every triangulable manifold have a vertex-transitive triangulation?

Does every triangulable manifold have a vertex-transitive triangulation?

When I talk about a vertex-transitive triangulation of a manifold, I mean in the sense of realizing a manifold homeomorphically as a simplicial complex such that the automorphism group of the simplicial complex is transitive on the vertices or 0-simplexes of the complex. This could also be formulated for other categories, like the category of simplicial sets, or the category of maps on surfaces (once you define G-actions suitably) but we'll stick with graphs and simplicial complexes here.

Two of the reasons I was interested in this problem is the work that's been done on local computability of characteristic classes of manifolds by Gelfand and others, as well as the conjecture of Kahn, Saks and Sturtevant on vertex transitive nonevasive complexes.

I'm surprised no one has really raised the question in print before, to my knowledge. Once, I thought I had an idea for a proof that some 2-manifolds can't be suitably triangulated, by focusing on surfaces which can't be realized suitably by regular maps (or flag transitive triangulations) and showing some of these surfaces can't be vertex transitively triangulated in any other way. I hope to return to this and complete the details sometime soon.

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Mike
Mike
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Does every manifold have a vertex-transitive triangulation?

When I talk about a vertex-transitive triangulation of a manifold, I mean in the sense of realizing a manifold homeomorphically as a simplicial complex such that the automorphism group of the simplicial complex is transitive on the vertices or 0-simplexes of the complex. This could also be formulated for other categories, like the category of simplicial sets, or the category of maps on surfaces (once you define G-actions suitably) but we'll stick with graphs and simplicial complexes here.

Two of the reasons I was interested in this problem is the work that's been done on local computability of characteristic classes of manifolds by Gelfand and others, as well as the conjecture of Kahn, Saks and Sturtevant on vertex transitive nonevasive complexes.

I'm surprised no one has really raised the question in print before, to my knowledge. Once, I thought I had an idea for a proof that some 2-manifolds can't be suitably triangulated, by focusing on surfaces which can't be realized suitably by regular maps (or flag transitive triangulations) and showing some of these surfaces can't be vertex transitively triangulated in any other way. I hope to return to this and complete the details sometime soon.