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We prove that in dimension 3 every nondegenerate contact form is carried by a broken book decomposition. As an application we get that if M is a closed irreducible oriented 3-manifold that is not a graph manifold, for example a hyperbolic…

We generalize a theorem of Finkelstein and Moriah and show that if a link $L$ has a $2n$-plat projection satisfying certain conditions, then its complement contains some closed essential surfaces. In most cases these surfaces remain…

We study a class of 3-manifolds called strong L-spaces, which by definition admit a certain type of Heegaard diagram that is particularly simple from the perspective of Heegaard Floer homology. We provide evidence for the possibility that…

This paper concerns the class of contractible open 3-manifolds which are ``locally finite strong end sums'' of eventually end-irreducible Whitehead manifolds. It is shown that whenever a 3-manifold in this class is a covering space of…

Let K' be a hyperbolic knot in S^3 and suppose that some Dehn surgery on K' with distance at least 3 from the meridian yields a 3-manifold M of Heegaard genus 2. We show that if M does not contain an embedded Dyck's surface (the closed…

It was recently shown that there exists an explicit bound for the number of Pachner moves needed to connect any two triangulation of any Haken 3-manifold which contains no fibred sub-manifolds as strongly simple pieces of its…

Every noncompact surface is shown to have a (3,6)-tight triangulation, and applications are given to the generic rigidity of countable bar-joint frameworks in R^3. In particular, every noncompact surface has a (3,6)-tight triangulation that…

Prime power fold cyclic branched covers along smoothly slice knots all bound rational homology balls. This phenomenon, however, does not characterize slice knots. In this paper, we give a new construction of non-slice knots that have the…

We construct families of manifolds that have pairs of genus $g$ Heegaard splittings that must be stabilized roughly $g$ times to become equivalent. We also show that when two unstabilized, boundary-unstabilized Heegaard splittings are…

In this article, we propose a new approach for describing and understanding knots and links in a 3-manifold through the use of an embedded non-orientable surface. Specifically, we define a plat-like representation based on this…

Kevin Hartshorn showed that if a three-dimensional manifold $M$ admits a Heegaard surface $\Sigma$ with Hempel distance $d$ then every incompressible surface in $M$ has genus at least $\frac{d}{2}$. Scharlemann-Tomova generalized this,…

We say that a cover of surfaces S -> X has the Birman--Hilden property if the subgroup of the mapping class group of X consisting of mapping classes that have representatives that lift to S embeds in the mapping class group of S modulo the…

We prove an additivity property for the normalized Seiberg-Witten invariants with respect to the universal abelian cover of those 3-manifolds, which are obtained via negative rational Dehn surgeries along connected sum of algebraic knots.…

An expository survey article on Heegaard splittings

We show that every closed connected non-orientable PL $4$-manifold $X$ is a simple branched covering of $\RP^4$. We also show that $X$ is a simple branched covering of the twisted $S^3$-bundle $S^1 \simtimes S^3$ if and only if the first…

Let $N$ be a compact, orientable hyperbolic 3-manifold whose boundary is a connected totally geodesic surface of genus $2$. If $N$ has Heegaard genus at least $5$, then its volume is greater than $2V_{\rm oct}$, where $V_{\rm…

For any knot $K$ in $S^3$ and any positive rational $r$, we show that smooth $(-r)$-surgery on $K$ always admits a tight contact structure. More specifically, the tightness is detected by the non-vanishing Heegaard Floer contact invariant.

We prove that every Kaehler solvmanifold has a finite covering whose holomorphic reduction is a principal bundle. An example is given that illustrates the necessity, in general, of passing to a proper covering. We also answer a stronger…

We use convex decomposition theory to (1) reprove the existence of a universally tight contact structure on every irreducible 3-manifold with nonempty boundary, and (2) prove that every toroidal 3-manifold carries infinitely many…

We construct examples of closed non-Haken hyperbolic 3-manifolds with a Heegaard splitting of arbitrarily large distance.