Related papers: Manifolds without conjugate points and their funda…

We show that closed, connected 4-manifolds up to connected sum with copies of the complex projective plane are classified in terms of the fundamental group, the orientation character and an extension class involving the second homotopy…

It is proved that the fundamental group of a complete Riemannian manifold with nonnegative Ricci curvature and certain volume growth conditions is trivial or finite.

We give a criterion on a group $\pi$ and a homomorphism $w \colon \pi \to C_2$ under which closed $4$-manifolds with fundamental group $\pi$ and orientation character $w$ are classified up to homotopy equivalence by their quadratic…

In this paper, we classify conjugacy classes of centralizers of irreducible subgroups in $PSL(n,\mathbb{C})$ using alternate modules a.k.a. finite abelian groups with an alternate bilinear form. When $n$ is squarefree, we prove that these…

We study the structure of generalized Baumslag-Solitar groups from the point of view of their (usually non-unique) splittings as fundamental groups of graphs of infinite cyclic groups. We find and characterize certain decompositions of…

Let $\Gamma$ be a torsion free discrete group acting cocompactly on a two dimensional euclidean building $\Delta$. The centralizer of an element of $\Gamma$ is either a Bieberbach group or is described by a finite graph of finite cyclic…

We characterize the quasiprojective groups that appear as fundamental groups of compact $3$-manifolds (with or without boundary). We also characterize all closed $3$-manifolds that admit good complexifications. These answer questions of…

In this article we introduce the notion of a k-almost-quasifibration and give many examples. We also show that a large class of these examples are not quasifibrations. As a consequence, supporting the Asphericity conjecture of [19], we…

We find conditions which ensure that the topological complexity of a closed manifold $M$ with abelian fundamental group is nonmaximal, and see through examples that our conditions are sharp. This generalizes results of Costa and Farber on…

We study finite groups $G$ with elements $g$ such that $\lvert \mathbf{C}_G(g)\rvert = \lvert G:G' \rvert$. (Such elements generalize fixed-point-free automorphisms of finite groups.) We show that these groups have a unique conjugacy class…

In this paper we compute the discrete fundamental groups of warped cones. As an immediate consequence, this allows us to show that there exist coarsely simply-connected expanders and superexpanders. This also provides a strong coarse…

We show that an odd dimensional closed manifold with positive curvature cannot contain an incompressible real projective plane in the sense that there is no map of the projective plane into the manifold which is nontrivial on both first and…

Closed essential surfaces in a three-manifold can be detected by ideal points of the character variety or by algebraic non-integral representations. We give examples of closed essential surfaces not detected in either of these ways. For…

Let A be a basic connected finite dimensional algebra over a field k and let Q be the ordinary quiver of A. To any presentation of A with Q and admissible relations, R. Martinez-Villa and J. A. de La Pena have associated a group called the…

We describe the outer automorphism group of a one-ended fundamental group of a graph of groups, when edge groups are cyclic, and vertex groups are torsion-free with cyclic centralizers. We show that in this case the outer automorphism group…

We describe all abelian groups which can appear as the fundamental groups of closed symplectically aspherical manifolds. The proofs use the theory of symplectic Lefschetz fibrations.

We prove that the existence of totally real immersions of manifolds is a closed property under cut-and-paste constructions along submanifolds including connected sums. We study the existence of totally real embeddings for simply connected…

A complete Riemannian manifold without conjugate points is called asymptotically harmonic if the mean curvature of its horospheres is a universal constant. Examples of asymptotically harmonic manifolds include flat spaces and rank one…

Any closed orientable and smooth non-positively curved manifold M is known to admit a geometric characteristic splitting, analogous to the JSJ decomposition in three dimensions. We show that when this splitting consists of pieces which are…

In this article we collect a series of observations that constrain actions of many groups on compact manifolds. In particular, we show that "generic" finitely generated groups have no smooth volume preserving actions on compact manifolds…