Related papers: Mapping class groups of covers with boundary and b…

We introduce a class of countable groups by some abstract group-theoretic conditions. It includes linear groups with finite amenable radical and finitely generated residually finite groups with some non-vanishing $\ell^2$-Betti numbers that…

Birman-Lubotzky-McCarthy proved that any abelian subgroup of the mapping class groups for orientable surfaces is finitely generated. We apply Birman-Lubotzky-McCarthy's arguments to the mapping class groups for non-orientable surfaces. We…

Based on the action of the mapping class group on the space of measured foliations, we construct a new boundary of the mapping class group and study the structure of this boundary. As an application, for any point in Teichmuller space, we…

We survey the analogy between Kleinian groups and subgroups of the mapping class group of a surface.

For every group genetic code with finite number of generating and at most with one defining relation we introduce the braid group of this genetic code. This construction includes the braid group of Euclidean plane, the braid groups of…

Artin groups of finite type are not as well understood as braid groups. This is due to the additional geometric properties of braid groups coming from their close connection to mapping class groups. For each Artin group of finite type, we…

This article grew out of an effort to understand the smooth mapping class groups of certain 4-manifolds in a geometric manner. We prove a smooth analog of the Birman-Hilden theorem for manifolds that admit a hyperk\"ahler structure. This…

We define and study extensions of Artin's representation and braid monodromy representation to the case of topological and algebraical generalisations of braid groups. In particular we provide faithful representations of braid groups of…

We prove by explicit construction that graph braid groups and most surface groups can be embedded in a natural way in right-angled Artin groups, and we point out some consequences of these embedding results. We also show that every…

In the 1970s Joan Birman and Hugh Hilden wrote several papers on the problem of relating the mapping class group of a surface to that of a cover. We survey their work, give an overview of the subsequent developments, and discuss open…

Irreducible Artin groups of finite type can be parametrized via their associated Coxeter diagrams into six sporadic examples and four infinite families, each of which is further parametrized by the natural numbers. Within each of these four…

In this paper, we construct an infinite presentation of the Torelli subgroup of the mapping class group of a surface whose generators consist of the set of all "separating twists", all "bounding pair maps", and all "commutators of simply…

We study mapping class group orbits of homotopy and isotopy classes of curves with self-intersections. We exhibit the asymptotics of the number of such orbits of curves with a bounded number of self-intersections, as the complexity of the…

We compute the invariant subspace of the rational group ring of a surface, truncated by powers of the augmentation ideal, under the action of the mapping class group. The surface is compact, oriented with one boundary component. This…

Big mapping class groups are the mapping class groups of infinite-type surfaces, that is, surfaces whose fundamental groups are not finitely generated. While mapping class groups of finite-type surfaces have been extensively studied, the…

We show that every subgroup of the mapping class group MCG(S) of a compact surface S is either virtually abelian or it has infinite dimensional second bounded cohomology. As an application, we give another proof of the…

By analyzing known presentations of the pure mapping groups of orientable surfaces of genus $g$ with $b$ boundary components and $n$ punctures, we show that these groups are isomorphic to some groups related to the braid groups and the…

We consider the subspace of the homology of a covering space spanned by lifts of simple closed curves. Our main result is the existence of unbranched covers of surfaces where this is a proper subspace. More generally, for a fixed finite…

We construct the first examples of normal subgroups of mapping class groups that are isomorphic to non-free right-angled Artin groups. Our construction also gives normal, non-free right-angled Artin subgroups of other groups, such as braid…

We study a wide range of homologically-defined representations of surface braid groups and of mapping class groups of surfaces, including the Lawrence-Bigelow representations of the classical braid groups. These representations naturally…