Multiparameter persistent homology (MPH) associates to a vector-valued filter function on a simplicial complex a multiparameter persistence module. In this talk, I will present recent joint work with Heather Harrington and Ulrike Tillmann on the inverse problem for MPH: given a persistence module, what can we say about the data that generated it? To study the geometry of the fibers of MPH, we equip both the space of filters and the moduli space of essentially finite persistence modules with natural stratifications that are preserved by the map. Over each stratum in its image, MPH restricts to a trivial fiber bundle whose fiber is a polyhedral complex. We also bound the dimension of MPH fibers in terms of multigraded Betti numbers, recovering the one-parameter bound of Leygonie and Tillmann as a special case.

Kesten's theorem characterises amenability in terms of spectral radii: a symmetric random walk on a group G has spectral radius 1 if and only if it generates an amenable subgroup.

We prove a quantitative "1%" version of this result for G a free group, or a fully residually free group: for every ε > 0, there is δ > 0 such that for every probability measure μ on G with convolution operator norm at least ε, there is a co-set of an amenable subgroup of G of mass > δ under μ.

This answers a question of Emmanuel Breuillard. We believe the same result to hold in a broader setting of linear groups, with δ depending on the dimension. The proof uses uniform exactness and a generalisation of the Tits alternative.

Joint work with Emmanuel Breuillard.