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A typical crystal is a finite piece of a material which may be invariant under some point symmetry group. If it is a so-called intrinsic higher-order topological insulator or superconductor, then it displays boundary modes at hinges or corners protected by the crystalline symmetry and the bulk topology. We explain the mechanism behind such phenomena using operator K-theory. Specifically, we derive a groupoid C ∗ -algebra that (1) encodes the dynamics of the electrons in the infinite size limit of a crystal; (2) remembers the boundary conditions at the crystal’s boundaries, and (3) admits a natural action by the point symmetries of the atomic lattice. The filtrations of the groupoid’s unit space by closed subsets that are invariant under the groupoid and point group actions supply equivariant cofiltrations of the groupoid C ∗ -algebra. We show that specific derivations of the induced spectral sequences in twisted equivariant K-theories enumerate all non-trivial higher-order bulk-boundary correspondences. 

Frieze groups are discrete subgroups of the full group of isometries of a flat strip. We investigate here the dynamics of specific architected materials generated by acting with a frieze group on a collection of self-coupling seed resonators. We demonstrate that, under unrestricted reconfigurations of the internal structures of the seed resonators, the dynamical matrices of the materials generate the full self-adjoint sector of the stabilized group C*-algebra of the frieze group. As a consequence, in applications where the positions, orientations and internal structures of the seed resonators are adiabatically modified, the spectral bands of the dynamical matrices carry a complete set of topological invariants that are fully accounted by the K-theory of the mentioned algebra. By resolving the generators of the K-theory, we produce the model dynamical matrices that carry the elementary topological charges, which we implement with systems of plate resonators to showcase several applications in spectral engineering. The paper is written in an expository style.