We investigate the bi-orderability of two-bridge knot groups and the groups of knots with 12 or fewer crossings by applying recent theorems of Chiswell, Glass and Wilson. Amongst all knots with 12 or fewer crossings (of which there are 2977), previous theorems were only able to determine bi-orderability of 499 of the corresponding knot groups. With our methods we are able to deal with 191 more.

We show that there are no non-trivial stratified bundles over a smooth simply connected quasi-projective variety over an algebraic closure of a finite field if the variety admits a normal projective compactification with boundary locus of codimension greater than or equal to $2$.

The tempered fundamental group of a p-adic variety classifies analytic étale covers that become topological covers for Berkovich topology after pullback by some finite étale cover. This paper constructs cospecialization homomorphisms between the (p′) versions of the tempered fundamental group of the fibers of a smooth morphism with polystable reduction. We study the question for families of curves in another paper. To construct them, we will start by describing the pro-(p′) tempered fundamental group of a smooth and proper variety with polystable reduction in terms of the reduction endowed with its log structure, thus defining tempered fundamental groups for log polystable varieties.

A method of choice for realizing finite groups as regular Galois groups over $\mathbb{Q}(T)$ is to find $\mathbb{Q}$-rational points on Hurwitz moduli spaces of covers. In another direction, the use of the so-called patching techniques has led to the realization of all finite groups over $\mathbb{Q}_p(T)$. Our main result shows that, under some conditions, these $p$-adic realizations lie on some special irreducible components of Hurwitz spaces (the so-called Harbater–Mumford components), thus connecting the two main branches of the area. As an application, we construct, for every projective system $(G_n)_{n\geq0}$ of finite groups, a tower of corresponding Hurwitz spaces $(\mathcal{H}_{G_n})_{n\geq0}$, geometrically irreducible and defined over some cyclotomic extension of $\mathbb{Q}$, which admits projective systems of $\mathbb{Q}_p^{\mathrm{ur}}$-rational points for all primes $p$ not dividing the orders $|G_n|$ ($n\geq0$).

It is shown that if the fundamental group of a normal algebraic variety, respectively Zariski open subset of a compact Kähler manifold, is solvable with a faithful linear representation over Q, respectively polycyclic, then it is virtually nilpotent.