The Dehn quandle of a closed orientable surface is the set of isotopy classes of nonseparating simple closed curves with a natural quandle structure arising from Dehn twists. In this paper, we consider the finiteness of some canonical quotients of these quandles. For a surface of positive genus, we give a precise description of the 2-quandle of its Dehn quandle. Further, with some exceptions for genus more than 2, we determine all values of n for which the n-quandle of its Dehn quandle is finite. The result can be thought of as the Dehn quandle analogue of a similar result of Hoste and Shanahan for link quandles [‘Links with finite n-quandles’, Algebr. Geom. Topol. 17(5) (2017), 2807–2823]. We also compute the size of the smallest nontrivial quandle quotient of the Dehn quandle of a surface. Along the way, we prove that the involutory quotient of an Artin quandle is precisely the corresponding Coxeter quandle, and also determine the smallest nontrivial quotient of a braid quandle.

In this note, we give an alternate proof of the Farrell–Jones isomorphism conjecture for the affine Artin groups of type $\widetilde B_n$.

We observe an inductive structure in a large class of Artin groups of finite real, complex and affine types and exploit this information to deduce the Farrell–Jones isomorphism conjecture for these groups.

We begin the paper with a simple formula for the second integral homology of a range of Artin groups. The formula is derived from a polytopal classifying space. We then introduce the notion of a twisted Artin group and obtain polytopal classifying spaces for a range of such groups. We demonstrate that these explicitly constructed spaces can be implemented on a computer and used in homological calculations.

We prove the existence of an involution on double affine Hecke algebras. This involution plays a central role in the theory of Macdonald polynomials, being responsible for a Fourier type duality and allowing the construction of affine intertwiners.

The graph product of a family of groups lies somewhere between their direct and free products, with the graph determining which pairs of groups commute. We show that the graph product of quasi-lattice ordered groups is quasi-lattice ordered, and, when the underlying groups are amenable, that it satisfies Nica's amenability condition for quasi-lattice orders. The associated Toeplitz algebras have a universal property, and their representations are faithful if the generating isometries satisfy a joint properness condition. When applied to right-angled Artin groups this yields a uniqueness theorem for the C*-algebra generated by a collection of isometries such that any two of them either *-commute or else have orthogonal ranges. The analogous result fails to hold for the nonabelian Artin groups of finite type considered by Brieskorn and Saito, and Deligne.