Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2024 iii Paper 134 2 c Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-09-25
The necessary and sufficient condition is the transverse-wall cocompactness criterion: there must be finitely many -orbits of finite transverse wall collections. Equivalently, their cardinalities must be uniformly bounded and, for every cardinality, there must be only finitely many orbits.
Indeed, an -cube of the dual cube complex of a wallspace is dual to an -element collection of pairwise crossing walls, and this correspondence respects the -action and passage to faces. If there are finitely many orbits of transverse collections, there are finitely many cube orbits, so the quotient is a finite cube complex and is compact. Conversely, if the action is cocompact, a compact fundamental set meets only finitely many open unit cubes. Hence there are finitely many cube orbits and therefore finitely many orbits of their dual transverse wall collections.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2024 iii Paper 134 2 d Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-09-25
The walls occur in three families of parallel lines, and a choice of halfspaces in one family is determined by an integer cut. Lines from different families cross, so the three cuts can be chosen independently. It follows directly from the dual cube complex of a wallspace construction thatand that is the standard cubulation of .
Choose affine coordinates for the three wall families so that the original Euclidean plane is and the walls are the integer level sets. On the cut coordinates , the translation subgroup of the Affine Coxeter group adds vectors satisfying , while its finite reflection subgroup permutes the three coordinates. Thereforeis constant on every -orbit. Since is unbounded, there are infinitely many vertex orbits. A cocompact cubical action on this locally finite cube complex would have only finitely many cube orbits, so the action of on is not cocompact.