Related papers: Cut-disks for level spheres in link and tangle com…
For each connected alternating tangle, we provide an infinite family of non-left-orderable L-spaces. This gives further support for Conjecture [3] of Boyer, Gordon, and Watson that is a rational homology 3-sphere is an L-space if and only…
We investigate great circle links in the three-sphere, the class of links where each component is a great circle. Using the geometry of their complements, we classify such links up to five components. For any two-bridge knot complement,…
A bridge sphere is said to be keen weakly reducible if it admits a unique pair of disjoint compressing disks on opposite sides. In particular, such a bridge sphere is weakly reducible, not perturbed, and not topologically minimal in the…
It is well-known that all 2-knots are slice. Are all 2-links slice? This is an outstanding open question. In this paper we prove the following: For any 2-component 2-link (J,K)in the 4-sphere which bounds the 5-ball B^5, there is an…
Given a simply-connected 4-manifold with boundary the 3-sphere, this paper establishes sufficient conditions for a knot in the boundary to be sliced by a locally flat disc in the 4-manifold, whose complement has finite cyclic fundamental…
In a paper of Menasco and Reid, it is conjectured that there exist no hyperbolic knots in S^3 for which the complement contains a closed embedded totally geodesic surface. In this note, we show that one can get "as close as possible" to a…
We show that all nontrivial embeddings of planar graphs on the torus contain a nontrivial knot or a nonsplit link. This is equivalent to showing that no minimally knotted planar spatial graphs on the torus exist that contain neither a…
A link is called $\chi-$slice if it bounds a smooth properly embedded surface in the 4-ball with no closed components and Euler characteristic 1. If a link has a single component, then it is $\chi-$slice if and only if it is slice. One…
A closed, orientable, splitting surface in an oriented $3$-manifold is a topologically minimal surface of index $n$ if its associated disk complex is $(n-2)$-connected but not $(n-1)$-connected. A critical surface is a topologically minimal…
Menasco proved the surprising result that if $G$ is a reduced, alternating, connected projection of a link $L$ and $G$ is prime then $L$ is prime. This result has been generalized to other classes of links, tangles, and spatial graphs. We…
We prove the nonexistence of lattice tilings of $\mathbb{Z}^n$ by Lee spheres of radius $2$ for all dimensions $n\geq 3$. This implies that the Golomb-Welch conjecture is true when the common radius of the Lee spheres equals $2$ and…
Every link is shown to be presentable as a boundary of an unknotted flat banded surface. A (flat) banded link is defined as a boundary of an unknotted (flat) banded surface. A link's (flat) band index is defined as the minimum number of…
The $L$-space conjecture asserts the equivalence, for prime 3-manifolds, of three properties: not being an $L$-space, having a left-orderable fundamental group, and admitting a co-oriented taut foliation. We investigate these properties for…
We investigate a variational problem in the Lorentz-Minkowski space $\l^3$ whose critical points are spacelike surfaces with constant mean curvature and making constant contact angle with a given support surface along its common boundary.…
A knot K in the 3-sphere is superslice if there is a slice disk D in the 4-ball such that the double of D along K is the unknotted 2-sphere S in $S^4$. Answering a question of Livingston-Meier, we find smoothly slice (in fact doubly slice)…
Bryant \cite{Bryant84} classified all Willmore spheres in $3$-space to be given by minimal surfaces in $\mathbb R^3$ with embedded planar ends. This note provides new explicit formulas for genus 0 minimal surfaces in $\mathbb R^3$ with…
This note gives the first example of a hyperbolic knot in the 3-sphere that lacks a nonorientable essential spanning surface; this disproves the Strong Neuwirth Conjecture formulated by Ozawa and Rubinstein. Moreover, this knot has no even…
It is shown that given any link-manifold, there is an algorithm to decide if the manifold contains an embedded, essential planar surface; if it does, the algorithm will construct one. If a slope on the boundary of the link-manifold is…
A free surface-link is a surface-link whose fundamental group is a free group not necessarily meridian-based. Free ribbon lemma says that every free sphere-link in the 4-sphere is a ribbon sphere-link. Four different proofs of Free ribbon…
Thin position for knots in the 3-sphere was introduced by Gabai and has been used in a variety of contexts. We conjecture an analogue to a theorem of Schubert and Schultens concerning the bridge number of satellite knots. For a satellite…