Related papers: Mapping class group relations, Stein fillings, and…
We derive two types of linearity conditions for mapping class groups of orientable surfaces: one for once-punctured surface, and the other for closed surface, respectively. For the once-punctured case, the condition is described in terms of…
Using deformations of foliations to contact structures as well as rigidity properties of Anosov foliations we provide infinite families of examples which show that the space of taut foliations in a given homotopy class of plane fields is in…
We prove that Stein surfaces with boundary coincide up to orientation preserving diffeomorphisms with simple branched coverings of $\B^4$ whose branch set is a positive braided surface. As a consequence, we have that a smooth oriented…
Suppose M is a connected, open, orientable, irreducible 3-manifold which is not homeomorphic to R^3. Given a compact 3-manifold J in M which satisfies certain conditions, Brin and Thickstun have associated to it an open neighborhood V$…
Generalizing the canonical symplectization of contact manifolds, we construct an infinite dimensional non-linear Stiefel manifold of weighted embeddings into a contact manifold. This space carries a symplectic structure such that the…
We take a first step towards understanding the relationship between foliations and universally tight contact structures on hyperbolic 3-manifolds. If a surface bundle over a circle has pseudo-Anosov holonomy, we obtain a classification of…
By a result of Eliashberg, every symplectic filling of a three-dimensional contact connected sum is obtained by performing a boundary connected sum on another symplectic filling. We prove a partial generalization of this result for…
We construct a covering of Culler-Vogtmann Outer space by the Teichmuller spaces of punctured surfaces. By considering the equivariant homology for the action of Out(F_n) on this covering, we construct a spectral sequence converging to the…
We employ the relationship between contact structures and Beltrami fields derived in part I of this series to construct steady nonsingular solutions to the Euler equations on a Riemannian $S^3$ whose flowlines trace out closed curves of all…
These lecture notes are devoted to the theory of equations of associativity describing geometry of moduli spaces of 2D topological field theories. Introduction. Lecture 1. WDVV equations and Frobenius manifolds. {Appendix A.} Polynomial…
The join construction produces a third Sasaki manifold from two others, and we investigate the algebraic topology of the joins of circle bundles over surfaces of positive genus with weighted three-spheres. Topologically, such a join has the…
In this article, we study the maximal length of positive Dehn twist factorizations of surface mapping classes. In connection to fundamental questions regarding the uniform topology of symplectic 4-manifolds and Stein fillings of contact…
We continue the study of linear families of contact forms on 3-manifolds begun in our paper `Contact geometry and complex surfaces'. The present paper introduces Teichmuller and moduli spaces for so-called taut contact circles. By…
Graph manifolds form important classes of $3$-dimensional closed and orientable manifolds. For example, {\it Seifert} manifolds are graph manifolds where hyperbolic manifolds are not. In applying singularity theory of differentiable maps to…
We provide some language for algebraic study of the mapping class groups for surfaces with non-connected boundary. As applications, we generalize our previous results on Dehn twists to any compact connected oriented surfaces with non-empty…
For any integer $n\geq 2$, we construct an infinite family of Stein fillable contact $(4n-1)$-manifolds each of which admits infinitely many pairwise homotopy inequivalent Stein fillings.
This paper presents a number of problems about mapping class groups and moduli space. The paper will appear in the book "Problems on Mapping Class Groups and Related Topics", ed. by B. Farb, Proc. Symp. Pure Math. series, Amer. Math. Soc.
Suppose that S is a surface with boundary and that g and h are diffeomorphisms of S which restrict to the identity on the boundary. Let Y_g, Y_h, and Y_{hg} be the three-manifolds with open book decompositions given by (S,g), (S,h), and…
We employ cut and paste contact topological techniques to classify some tight contact structures on the closed, oriented genus-2 surface times the interval. A boundary condition is specified so that the Euler class of the of the contact…
We compute the contact manifold of null geodesics of the family of spacetimes $\{(\mathbb{S}^2\times\mathbb{S}^1, g_\circ-\frac{d^2}{c^2}dt^2)\}_{d,c\in\mathbb{N}^+\text{ coprime}}$, with $g_\circ$ the round metric on $\mathbb{S}^2$ and $t$…