Related papers: Cabling, contact structures and mapping class mono…
We introduce an essential open book foliation, a refinement of the open book foliation, and develop technical estimates of the fractional Dehn twist coefficient (FDTC) of monodromies and the FDTC for closed braids, which we introduce as…
We study smooth proper embeddings of compact orientable surfaces in compact orientable $4$-manifolds and elements in the mapping class group of that surface which are induced by diffeomorphisms of the ambient $4$-manifolds. We call such…
We investigate nicely embedded H--holomorphic maps into stable Hamiltonian three--manifolds. In particular we prove that such maps locally foliate and satisfy a no--first--intersection property. Using the compactness results of…
We present an alternate description of the Ozsvath-Szabo contact class in Heegaard Floer homology. Using our contact class, we prove that if a contact structure (M,\xi) has an adapted open book decomposition whose page S is a once-punctured…
We introduce twist left-veering mapping classes of punctured surfaces. We prove that a twist left-veering open book supports an overtwisted contact structure and determine when the closed braid coming from the punctures is loose or…
In the context of complex algebraic varieties, the decomposition theorem for semi-small maps provides a decomposition of the direct image of the constant sheaf. In this work, we develop a decomposition theorem for branched coverings of…
We take advantage of the correspondence between fibered links, open book decompositions and contact structures on a closed connected 3-dimensional manifold to determine a mixed link diagram presentation for a particular fibered link $L$ in…
We study diffeomorphisms of compact, oriented surfaces, developing methods of distinguishing those which have positive factorizations into Dehn twists from those which satisfy the weaker condition of right veering. We use these to construct…
We classify commutative algebraic monoid structures on normal affine surfaces over an algebraically closed field of characteristic zero. The answer is given in two languages: comultiplications and Cox coordinates. The result follows from a…
In this paper we use 3-manifold techniques to illuminate the structure of the string link monoid. In particular, we give a prime decomposition theorem for string links on two components as well as give necessary conditions for string links…
As an application of the construction of open books on plumbed 3-manifolds, we construct elliptic open books on torus bundles over the circle. In certain cases these open books are compatible with Stein fillable contact structures and have…
We consider collections of disjoint simple closed curves in a compact orientable surface which decompose the surface into pairs of pants. The isotopy classes of such curve systems form the vertices of a 2-complex, whose edges correspond to…
In this paper, we introduce the notions of an iterated planar Lefschetz fibration and an iterated planar open book decomposition and prove the Weinstein conjecture for contact manifolds supporting an open book that has iterated planar…
We construct a Seifert surface for a given null-homologous transverse link in a contact manifold that is compatible with a planar open book decomposition, then obtain a formula of the self-linking number. It extends Bennequin's self-linking…
We give an alternative proof of a theorem of Honda-Kazez-Mati\'c that every non-right-veering open book supports an overtwisted contact structure. We also study two types of examples that show how overtwisted discs are embedded relative to…
We show that, under a certain condition, contact 5-manifolds can `coarsely' distinguish smooth structures on compact Stein 4-manifolds via contact open books. We also give a simple sufficient condition for an infinite family of Stein…
We give new decomposition theorems for classes of graphs that can be transduced in first-order logic from classes of sparse graphs -- more precisely, from classes of bounded expansion and from nowhere dense classes. In both cases, the…
We consider the problem of realizing tight contact structures on closed orientable three-manifolds. By applying the theorems of Hofer et al., one may deduce tightness from dynamical properties of (Reeb) flows transverse to the contact…
Fractional Dehn twists give a measure of the difference between the relative isotopy class of a homeomorphism of a bordered surface and the Thurston representative of its free isotopy class. We show how to estimate and compute these…
In this article, we prove a generalization of a theorem of Lisca-Matic to Stein cobordisms and develop a method for distinguishing certain Stein cobordisms using rotation numbers. Using these results along with standard techniques from…