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Homeomorphism groups of countable Stone spaces fall into three coarse shapes, including the infinite Hamming cube | arXiv News

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Homeomorphism groups of countable Stone spaces fall into three coarse shapes, including the infinite Hamming cube

July 2, 2026arXiv: 2607.01196v1

This paper classifies the large-scale geometry of symmetry groups of countable Stone spaces. A Stone space is a compact topological space made from countable discrete pieces, and each such space is described by two simple pieces of data: a Cantor–Bendixson rank α (a countable ordinal that measures how points cluster) and an integer n≥1 that counts the points of maximal rank. The authors show that the homeomorphism groups of these spaces (the groups of continuous self-maps) fall into exactly three coarse equivalence classes determined by α and n.

Concretely, the three cases are: when n=1 the group is coarsely bounded and so is quasi-isometric to a single point; when n>1 and α is a successor ordinal the group is quasi-isometric to the countably infinite Hamming cube; and when n>1 and α is a limit ordinal the group is coarsely equivalent to a certain “one-ended tree of Hamming cubes.” The countably infinite Hamming cube is the graph whose vertices are binary sequences with only finitely many 1s, with edges joining sequences that differ in a single coordinate. The paper also proves that infinite Hamming graphs built from any finite alphabet are essentially the same shape (bi-Lipschitz equivalent).

To reach these conclusions the authors build explicit geometric models for the groups. They use versions of Cayley graphs adapted to topological groups, called Cayley–Abels–Rosendal graphs, and for groups that are not generated by coarsely bounded sets they use a coarse variant introduced by Kopreski and Shaji. One guiding example is the two-point compactification of the integers. In that example vertices of the model graph correspond to ways of splitting the space into two clopen pieces, and those splits differ only on finitely many points. Recording those finitely many differences identifies the graph with the Hamming cube. More generally, the paper organizes orbits of vertices and applies tools from Bass–Serre theory to build the countable graphs that reflect each group’s coarse geometry.

Why this matters: geometric group theory has many powerful tools for finitely generated or locally compact groups, but less is known for non-locally compact topological groups. This work gives one of the first complete quasi-isometry classifications for an infinite family of such groups. The classification also provides explicit geometric models, which can guide future study and suggest connections to other groups arising in topology, such as mapping class groups of infinite-type surfaces.

Important caveats: the results are about the homeomorphism groups equipped with the compact-open topology and should be read as statements about their large-scale geometry as topological groups. The quasi-isometry notion used is the one appropriate to a maximal continuous left-invariant metric on the group. The authors note that this classification of Homeo(X) does not automatically extend to mapping class groups of surfaces: the natural quotient from a mapping class group to a homeomorphism group need not be a quasi-isometry, and other operations on the underlying space (like taking Cantor–Bendixson derivatives) do not always preserve quasi-isometry for related mapping class groups.

Source paper

Coarse geometry of homeomorphism groups: Classifying countable Stone spaces

MathematicsMathematicsMathematics
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