Related papers: The mapping class group and the Meyer function for…

We study a secondary invariant, called the Meyer function, on the fundamental group of the complement of the dual variety of a smooth projective variety. This invariant have played an important role when studying the local signatures of…

We give a survey on Meyer functions, with emphasis on their application to the signatures of fibered 4-manifolds.

We give an explicit formula for the signature of handlebody bundles over the circle in terms of the homological monodromy. This gives a cobounding function of Meyer's signature cocycle on the mapping class group of a $3$-dimensional…

In this paper we define a $\mathbf{QP}^1$-valued class function on the mapping class group $\mathcal{M}_{g,2}$ of a surface $\Sigma_{g,2}$ of genus $g$ with two boundary components. Let $E$ be a $\Sigma_{g,2}$ bundle over a pair of pants…

The action of the mapping class group of a surface on the collection of homotopy classes of disjointly embedded curves or arcs in the surface is discussed here as a tool for understanding Riemann's moduli space and its topological and…

We consider the space of smooth complex projective plane curves of degree d. Defined over this is the tautological family of plane curves, and hence there is a monodromy representation into the mapping class group of the fiber. We show two…

Let p be a finite regular covering on a 2-sphere with at least three branch points. In this paper, we construct a local signature for the class of fibrations whose general fibers are isomorphic to the covering p.

Werner Meyer constructed a cocycle in $H^2(Sp(2g, \mathbb{Z}); \mathbb{Z})$ which computes the signature of a closed oriented surface bundle over a surface, with fibre a surface of genus g. By studying properties of this cocycle, he also…

We consider finite-sheeted, regular, possibly branched covering spaces of compact surfaces with boundary and the associated liftable and symmetric mapping class groups. In particular, we classify when either of these subgroups coincides…

The mapping class group of a surface with one boundary component admits numerous interesting representations including as a group of automorphisms of a free group and as a group of symplectic transformations. Insofar as the mapping class…

We define a geometrically meaningful compactification of the moduli space of smooth plane curves, which can be calculated explicitly. The basic idea is to regard a plane curve D in P^2 as a pair (P^2,D) of a surface together with a divisor,…

We define orbifold mapping class groups (with marked points) and study them using their action on certain orbifold analogs of arcs and simple closed curves. Moreover, we establish a Birman exact sequence for suitable subgroups of orbifold…

We propose a topological approach to the problem of determining a curve from its iterated integrals. In particular, we prove that a family of terms in the signature series of a two dimensional closed curve with finite p variation, 1\leq…

Recently, the first author classified finite groups obtained as automorphism groups of smooth plane curves of degree $d \ge 4$ into five types. He gave an upper bound of the order of the automorphism group for each types. For one of them,…

We present a rigidity theorem for the action of the mapping class group $\pi_0(\mathrm{Diff}(M))$ on the space $\mathcal{R}^+(M)$ of metrics of positive scalar curvature for high dimensional manifolds $M$. This result is applicable to a…

We describe the action of the mapping class group $M(g,n)$ on the fundamental group of $T_{g,n}$, a compact orientable topological surface of positive genus $g$ with $n$ marked points. This is achieved by computing the image of the…

One can easily show that any meromorphic function on a complex closed Riemann surface can be represented as a composition of a birational map of this surface to CP^2 and a projection of the image curve from an appropriate point p in CP^2 to…

We compute the topological mapping class group of every compact, simply connected, topological 4-manifold. This was previously only known in the closed case. If the 4-manifold is smooth, we deduce an analogous description of the stable…

The signature of a surface bundle over a surface is known to be divisible by 4. It is also known that the signature vanishes if the fiber genus is less than or equal to 2 or the base genus is less than or equal to 1. In this article, we…

We show that the action of the mapping class group on the space of closed curves of a closed surface effectively tracks the corresponding action on Teichm\"uller space in the following sense: for all but quantitatively few mapping classes,…