Related papers: Meridional Almost Normal Surfaces in Knot Compleme…

In this thesis, we use normal surface theory to understand certain properties of minimal triangulations of compact orientable 3-manifolds. We describe the collapsing process of normal 2-spheres and disks. Using some geometrical…

A surface automorphism is strongly irreducible if every essential simple closed curve in the surface has nontrivial geometric intersection with its image. We show that a three-manifold admits only finitely many inequivalent surface bundle…

A bridge position of a knot is said to be perturbed if there exists a cancelling pair of bridge disks. Motivated by the examples of knots admitting unperturbed strongly irreducible non-minimal bridge positions due to…

We present a practical algorithm to test whether a 3-manifold given by a triangulation or an ideal triangulation contains a closed essential surface. This property has important theoretical and algorithmic consequences. As a testament to…

Suppose that every non-minimal bridge position of a knot $K$ is perturbed. We show that if $L$ is a $(2, 2q)$-cable link of $K$, then every non-minimal bridge position of $L$ is also perturbed.

We show that for any nontrivial knot $K$ and any natural number $n$ there is a diagram $D$ of $K$ such that the unknotting number of $D$ is greater than or equal to $n$. It is well known that twice the unknotting number of $K$ is less than…

In this paper, we give several results on area minimizing surfaces in strictly mean convex 3-manifolds. First, we study the genus of absolutely area minimizing surfaces in a compact, orientable, strictly mean convex 3-manifold M bounded by…

Let $X$ be a closed indefinite $4$-manifold with $b_+(X) = 3 \; ({\rm mod} \; 4)$ and with non-vanishing mod $2$ Seiberg--Witten invariants. We prove a new lower bound on the genus of a properly embedded surface in $X \setminus B^4$…

We give a new characterization of symplectic surfaces in CP^2 via bridge trisections. Specifically, a minimal genus surface in CP^2 is smoothly isotopic to a symplectic surface if and only if it is smoothly isotopic to a surface in…

We study unknottedness for free boundary minimal surfaces in a three-dimensional Riemannian manifold with nonnegative Ricci curvature and strictly convex boundary, and for self-shrinkers in the three-dimensional Euclidean space. For doing…

We provide a new proof of the following results of H. Schubert: If K is a satellite knot with companion J and pattern L that lies in a solid torus T in which it has index k, then the bridge numbers satisfy the following: 1) The bridge…

Let $K$ be a null-homologous knot in a three-manifold $Y$. We give a description of the Heegaard Floer homology of integer surgeries on $Y$ along $K$ in terms of the filtered homotopy type of the knot invariant for $K$. As an illustration,…

We show that if $F$ is a smooth, closed, orientable surface embedded in a closed, orientable 3-manifold $M$ such that for each Riemannian metric $g$ on $M$, $F$ is isotopic to a least-area surface $F(g)$, then $F$ is incompressible.

The paper is devoted to relations between topological and metric properties of germs of real surfaces, obtained by analytic maps from $R^2$ to $R^4$. We show that for a big class of such surfaces the normal embedding property implies the…

We call a knot in the 3-sphere $SU(2)$-simple if all representations of the fundamental group of its complement which map a meridian to a trace-free element in $SU(2)$ are binary dihedral. This is a generalisation of being a 2-bridge knot.…

In this paper, we show that any unknotting tunnel for a two bridge knot is isotopic to either one of known ones. This together with Morimoto-Sakuma's result gives the complete classification of unknotting tunnels for two bridge knots up to…

We describe four hyperbolic knot complements in $\mathbb{S}^3$, each of which covers a prism orbifold: the quotient of $\mathbb{H}^3$ by the action of a discrete group generated by reflections in the faces of a polyhedron that has the…

The $AJ$-conjecture for a knot $K \subset S^3$ relates the $A$-polynomial and the colored Jones polynomial of $K$. If a two-bridge knot $K$ satisfies the $AJ$-conjecture, we give sufficient conditions on $K$ for the $(r,2)$-cable knot $C$…

We show that if $M$ is a sub-Riemannian manifold and $N$ is a Carnot group such that the nilpotentization of $M$ at almost every point is isomorphic to $N$, then there are subsets of $N$ of positive measure that embed into $M$ by…

We give a short proof of Bing's characterization of $S^3$: a compact, connected 3-manifold $M$ is $S^3$ if and only if every knot in $M$ is isotopic into a ball.