Related papers: A note on open 3-manifolds supporting foliations b…

An (flat) affine $3$-manifold is a $3$-manifold with an atlas of charts to an affine space ${\mathbf R}^3$ with transition maps in the affine transformation group $Aff({\mathbf R}^3)$. Equivalently an affine $3$-manifold is a $3$-manifold…

Plante-Thurston proved that every nilpotent subgroup of $\Diff^2(S^1)$ is abelian. One of our main results is a sharp converse: $\Diff^1(S^1)$ contains every finitely-generated, torsion-free nilpotent group.

This note studies the Burnside problem for homeomorphism groups of compact connected manifolds. For surfaces, we prove that the identity component of the homeomorphism group is torsion-free precisely when the surface is not the sphere,…

We study the topology of the space of smooth codimension one foliations on a closed 3-manifold. We regard this space as the space of integrable plane fields included in the space of all smooth plane fields. It has been known since the late…

Let $M$ be a simply connected closed $4$-manifold. It is proved that any (possibly finite) compact Lie group acting effectively and homologically trivially on $M$ by homeomorphisms is an abelian group of rank at most two. As applications,…

We prove a complete classification of degree-$2$ foliations on $\mathbb{P}^n$ in any dimension, assuming they are not algebraically integrable. If $\mathcal{F}$ is such a foliation, then either $\mathcal{F}$ is the linear pull-back of a…

In this article, we are interested in the question whether any complete contractible $3$-manifold of positive scalar curvature is homeomorphic to $\mathbb{R}^{3}$. We study the fundamental group at infinity, $\pi_{1}^{\infty}$, and its…

Consider all moduli points corresponding with polarized abelian varieties in characteristic p such that the associated quasi-polarized p-divisible group is geometrically isomorphic with a given one. This defines a subset C of the moduli…

We show that any open aspherical manifold of dimension n>3 is tangentially homotopy equivalent to an n-manifold whose universal cover is not homeomorphic to the Euclidean space.

Let $\mathcal{F}$ be a transversely orientable codimension one minimal foliation without vanishing cycles of a manifold $M$. We show that if the fundamental group of each leaf of $\mathcal{F}$ has polynomial growth of degree $k$ for some…

Bifoliated planes arise naturally in the study of Anosov flows on $3$-manifolds. To any Anosov flow on a $3$-manifold $M$, one can associate a bifoliated plane equipped with an action of the fundamental group of $M$ which encodes the…

When a solenoid is embedded in three space, its complement is an open three manifold. We discuss the geometry and fundamental groups of such manifolds, and show that the complements of different solenoids (arising from different inverse…

We introduce a new class of possibly noncompact n-dimensional manifolds without boundary associated to finite data which we call topological automata. This class is large enough to contain many interesting examples of open 2-dimensional and…

A space is defined to be "$n$-spheroidal" if it has the homotopy type of an $n$-dimensional CW-complex $X$ with $H_{n}(X, \mathbb{Z})$ not zero and finitely generated. A group $G$ is called "$n$-spheroidal" if its classifying space $K(G,1)$…

It is known that the automorphism group of any projective K3 surface is finitely generated [24]. In this paper, we consider a certain kind of K3 surfaces with Picard number 3 whose automorphism groups are isomorphic to congruence subgroups…

We study the fundamental group of an open $n$-manifold $M$ of nonnegative Ricci curvature with additional stability condition on $\widetilde{M}$, the Riemannian universal cover of $M$. We prove that if any tangent cone of $\widetilde{M}$ at…

Open, connected, saturated sets W without holonomy in codimension one foliations play key roles as fundamental building blocks. Here, for the case of foliated 3-manifolds, we produce a finite system of closed, convex, non-overlapping…

Let F be a finitely generated discrete group. Given a covering map H to G of Lie groups with G either compact or complex reductive, there is an induced covering map Hom(F, H) to Hom(F, G). We show that when the fundamental group of G is…

We consider embeddings of 3-manifolds in $S^4$ such that each of the two complementary regions has an abelian fundamental group. In particular, we show that an homology handle $M$ has such an embedding if and only if $\pi_1(M)'$ is perfect,…

Suppose that $f$ is a homomorphism from the mapping class group $\mathcal{M}(N_{g,n})$ of a nonorientable surface of genus $g$ with $n$ boundary components, to $\mathrm{GL}(m,\mathbb{C})$. We prove that if $g\ge 5$, $n\le 1$ and $m\le g-2$,…