Anders Björner & Fred Cohen 
Configuration Spaces [PDF ebook] 
Geometry, Combinatorics and Topology

On the structure of spaces of commuting elements in compact Lie groups.- On the fundamental group of the complement of two real tangent conics and an arbitrary number of real tangent lines.- Intersection cohomology of a rank one local system on the complement of a hyperplane-like divisor.- Characters of fundamental groups of curve complements and orbifold pencils.- A survey of some recent results concerning polyhedral products.- Analytic continuation of a parametric polytope and wall-crossing.- Embeddings of braid groups into mapping class groups and their homology.- The cohomology of the braid group B3 and of SL2(Z) with coefficients in a geometric representation.- Pure braid groups are not residually free.- Hodge–Deligne equivariant polynomials and monodromy of hyperplane arrangements.- The contravariant form on singular vectors of a projective arrangement.- Fox–Neuwirth cell structures and the cohomology of symmetric groups.- Basic questions on Artin–Tits groups.- Rational cohomology of the real Coxeter toric variety of type A.- Arrangements stable under the Coxeter groups.- Quantum and homological representations of braid groups.- Cohomology of the complement to an elliptic arrangement.- Residual nilpotence for generalizations of pure braid groups.- Some topological problems on the configuration spaces of Artin and Coxeter groups.- Chromatic quasisymmetric functions and Hessenberg varieties.- Geometric and homological finiteness in free abelian covers.- Minimal stratifications for line arrangements and positive homogeneous presentations for fundamental groups.