Related papers: Signature, positive Hopf plumbing and the Coxeter …

Alternating-sign Hopf plumbing along a tree yields fibered alternating links whose homological monodromy is, up to a sign, conjugate to some alternating-sign Coxeter transformation. Exploiting this tie, we obtain results about the location…

For a positive Hopf plumbed arborescent Seifert surface $S$, we study the set of Hopf bands $H\subset S$, up to homology and up to the action of the monodromy. The classification of Seifert surfaces for which this set is finite is closely…

Let S(D) be the surface produced by applying Seifert's algorithm to the oriented link diagram D. I prove that if D has no negative crossings then S(D) is a quasipositive Seifert surface, that is, S(D) embeds incompressibly on a fiber…

While the problem of computing the genus of a knot is now fairly well understood, no algorithm is known for its four-dimensional variants, both in the smooth and in the topological locally flat category. In this article, we investigate a…

We apply spectral graph theory and a theorem of A'Campo to express the first and second coefficients of the Coxeter polynomials associated with certain bipartite quivers in terms of the degrees of the vertices in their underlying graphs. As…

Given a connect sum of link diagrams, there is an isomorphism which decomposes unnormalized Khovanov chain groups for the product in terms of normalized chain groups for the factors; this isomorphism is straightforward to see on the level…

We give a short, geometric proof of Graham's theorem on positivity in the equivariant cohomology of a flag variety, based on a transversality argument.

Hopf conjectured that even-dimensional closed Riemannian manifolds with positive sectional curvature have positive Euler characteristic. The conclusion of the conjecture is known to fail if the positive sectional curvature assumption is…

For any right-angled Coxeter group $\Gamma$ on $k$ generators, we construct proper actions of $\Gamma$ on $\mathrm{O}(p,q+1)$ by right and left multiplication, and on the Lie algebra $\mathfrak{o}(p,q+1)$ by affine transformations, for some…

The Peterson variety is a subvariety of the flag manifold $G/B$ equipped with an action of a one-dimensional torus, and a torus invariant paving by affine cells, called Peterson cells. We prove that the equivariant pull-backs of Schubert…

${\bf Z}_2\times {\bf Z}_2$ Coxeter orbifolds are constructed with the property that some twisted sectors have fixed planes for which the six-torus can not be decomposed into a direct sum ${\bf T}^2\bigoplus{\bf T}^4 $ with the fixed plane…

For any closed oriented surface F of genus at least three, we prove the existence of foliated F-bundles over surfaces such that the signatures of the total spaces are non-zero. We can arrange that the total holonomy of the horizontal…

The ring of symmetric functions can be implemented in the homology of \union_{a,b} Gr(a,a+b), the multiplicative structure being defined from the "direct sum" map. There is a natural circle action (simultaneously on all Grassmannians) under…

For $k \ge 2,$ let $M^{4k-1}$ be a $(2k{-}2)$-connected closed manifold. If $k \equiv 1$ mod $4$ assume further that $M$ is $(2k{-}1)$-parallelisable. Then there is a homotopy sphere $\Sigma^{4k-1}$ such that $M \sharp \Sigma$ admits a…

We define a set of "second-order" L^(2)-signature invariants for any algebraically slice knot. These obstruct a knot's being a slice knot and generalize Casson-Gordon invariants, which we consider to be "first-order signatures". As one…

For closed oriented manifolds, we establish oriented homotopy invariance of higher signatures that come from the fundamental group of a large class of orientable 3-manifolds, including the ``piecewise geometric'' ones in the sense of…

This paper discusses the asymptotic behaviour of the number of descents in a random signed permutation and its inverse, which was posed as an open problem by Chatterjee and Diaconis in a recent publication. For that purpose, we generalize…

A theory of signatures for odd-dimensional links in rational homology spheres is studied via their generalized Seifert surfaces. The jump functions of signatures are shown invariant under appropriately generalized concordance and a special…

We compute the continuous bounded cohomology of the full automorphism groups of regular trees in all positive degrees, with coefficients arising from any irreducible continuous unitary representations. To the author's knowledge, this seems…

We introduce a crossed module of piecewise linear surfaces and study the signature homomorphism, defined as the surface holonomy of a universal translation invariant $2$-connection. This provides a transform whereby surfaces are represented…