  We study the expected topological properties of Cech and Vietoris-Rips
complexes built on i.i.d. random points in R^d. We find higher dimensional
analogues of known results for connectivity and component counts for random
geometric graphs. However, higher homology H_k is not monotone when k > 0. In
particular for every k > 0 we exhibit two thresholds, one where homology passes
from vanishing to nonvanishing, and another where it passes back to vanishing.
We give asymptotic formulas for the expectation of the Betti numbers in the
sparser regimes, and bounds in the denser regimes. The main technical
contribution of the article is in the application of discrete Morse theory in
geometric probability.
