Related papers: Topological Classification of Multiaxial U(n)-Acti…

The disk complex of a surface in a 3-manifold is used to define its {\it topological index}. Surfaces with well-defined topological index are shown to generalize well-known classes, such as incompressible, strongly irreducible, and critical…

We use the reflection group trick to glue manifolds with corners that are Borel-Serre compactifications of locally symmetric spaces of noncompact type and obtain aspherical manifolds. We call these \emph{piecewise locally symmetric}…

Unifying several directions of the development of the study of summing multilinear operators between Banach spaces, we construct a general framework that studies, under one single definition, multilinear operators that are summing with…

We propose a new notion of `n-category with duals', which we call a Whitney n-category. There are two motivations. The first is that Baez and Dolan's Tangle Hypothesis is (almost) tautological when interpreted as a statement about Whitney…

Let X be a complex projective variety of dimension n with only isolated normal singularities. In this paper we prove, using mixed Hodge theory, that if the link of each singular point of X is (n-2)-connected, then X is a formal topological…

We calculate certain homotopy groups of the moduli spaces for representations of a compact oriented surface in the Lie groups GL(n,C) and U(p,q). Our approach relies on the interpretation of these representations in terms of Higgs bundles…

A manifold $M$ is said to be a double disk bundle if it can be decomposed as a union of two disk bundles glued together by a diffeomorphism of their boundaries. We show that if $M^n$ is a closed simply connected $n$-manifold with $n$ even…

Graph classification plays an important role is data mining, and various methods have been developed recently for classifying graphs. In this paper, we propose a novel method for graph classification that is based on homotopy equivalence of…

In this paper, we classify homomorphisms from the braid group of $n$ strands to the mapping class group of a genus $g$ surface. In particular, we show that when $g<n-2$, all representations are either cyclic or standard. Our result is sharp…

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…

Given the interest in relating the large $N$ limit of SU(N) to groups of area-preserving diffeomorphisms, we consider the topologies of these groups and show that both in terms of homology and homotopy, they are extremely different. Similar…

An upper bound is obtained on the rank of a torus which can act smoothly and effectively on a smooth, closed, simply connected, rationally elliptic manifold. In the maximal-rank case, the manifolds admitting such actions are classified up…

It is a basic question in contact geometry to classify all non-isotopic tight contact structures on a given 3-manifold. If the manifold has a boundary, we need also specify the dividing set on the boundary. In this paper, we answer the…

Unpublished results of S Straus and W Browder state that two notions of homotopy equivalence for manifolds with smooth group actions - isovariant and equivariant - often coincide under a condition called the Gap Hypothesis; the proofs use…

We compute the mapping class group of the manifolds $\sharp^g(S^{2k+1}\times S^{2k+1})$ for $k>0$ in terms of the automorphism group of the middle homology and the group of homotopy $(4k+3)$-spheres. We furthermore identify its Torelli…

Let M be an n-manifold, and let A be a space with a partial sum behaving as an n-fold loop sum. We define the space C(M;A) of configurations in M with summable labels in A via operad theory. Some examples are symmetric products, labelled…

This article shows several new methods for proofs on Kan complexes while using them to give a compact introduction to the homotopy groups of these complexes. Then more advanced objects are studied starting with homology and the Hurewicz…

For any homotopy class h in any compact orientable 3-manifold M which is closed or has exclusively torus boundary components, we produce infinitely many pairs of distinct knots representing h with orientation-preserving homeomorphic…

Indexed symmetric monoidal categories are an important refinement of bicategories -- this structure underlies several familiar bicategories, including the homotopy bicategory of parametrized spectra, and its equivariant and fiberwise…

The question of whether a given H-space X is, up to homotopy, a loop space has been studied from a variety of viewpoints. Here we address this question from the aspect of homotopy operations, in the classical sense of operations on homotopy…