Related papers: Bridge trisections in $\mathbb{CP}^2$ and the Thom…
The concept of a normal surface in a triangulated, compact 3-manifold was generalised by Thurston to a spun-normal surface in a non-compact 3-manifold with ideal triangulation. This paper defines a boundary curve map which takes a…
Previously work of the author with Meier and Starkston showed that every closed symplectic manifold $(X,\omega)$ with a rational symplectic form admits a trisection compatible with the symplectic topology. In this paper, we describe the…
How much cutting is needed to simplify the topology of a surface? We provide bounds for several instances of this question, for the minimum length of topologically non-trivial closed curves, pants decompositions, and cut graphs with a given…
Let $X$ be a bundle over $S^1$ with fiber a 3--manifold $M$ and with monodromy $\varphi$. Gay and Kirby showed that if $\varphi$ fixes a genus $g$ Heegaard splitting of $M$ then $X$ has a genus $6g+1$ trisection. Genus $3g+1$ trisections…
A multisection is a decomposition of a manifold into 1-handlebodies, where each subcollection of the pieces intersects along a 1-handlebody except the global intersection which is a closed surface. These generalizations of Heegaard…
We study immersed surfaces in smooth 4-manifolds via singular banded unlink diagrams. Such a diagram consists of a singular link with bands inside a Kirby diagram of the ambient 4-manifold, representing a level set of the surface with…
For several embedded surfaces with zero self-intersection number in 4-manifolds, we show that an adjunction-type genus bound holds for at least one of the surfaces under certain conditions. For example, we derive certain adjunction…
A "folklore conjecture, probably due to Tutte" (as described in [P.D. Seymour, Sums of circuits, Graph theory and related topics (Proc. Conf., Univ. Waterloo, 1977), pp. 341-355, Academic Press, 1979]) asserts that every bridgeless cubic…
Coincidences of maps between smooth manifolds are studied via a geometric approach which involves (nonstabilized) normal bordism theory and pathspaces.
We study trisections of smooth, compact non-orientable 4-manifolds, and introduce trisections of non-orientable 4-manifolds with boundary. In particular, we prove a non-orientable analogue of a classical theorem of Laudenbach-Po\'enaru. As…
We show that the only closed 4-manifolds admitting genus two trisections are $S^2 \times S^2$ and connected sums of $S^1 \times S^3$, $\mathbb{CP}^2$, and $\overline{\mathbb{CP}}^2$ with two summands. Moreover, each of these manifolds…
A bridge trisection of a smooth surface in $S^4$ is a decomposition analogous to a bridge splitting of a link in $S^3$. The Kirby-Thompson invariant of a bridge trisection measures its complexity in terms of distances between disc sets in…
Let M be a compressionbody containing a graph T (with at least one edge) such that \boundary_+ M is parallel to the union of T and \boundary_- M. We extend methods of Hayashi and Shimokawa to classify bridge surfaces for T. The results of…
We present some algorithms that provide useful topological information about curves in surfaces. One of the main algorithms computes the geometric intersection number of two properly embedded 1-manifolds $C_1$ and $C_2$ in a compact…
In this paper, we study the geometry of trisections on certain rational elliptic surfaces. We utilize Mumford representations of semi-reduced divisors in order to construct trisections and related plane curves with interesting properties…
We develop a theory of confluence of graphs. We describe an algorithm for proving that a given system of reduction rules for abstract graphs and graphs in surfaces is locally confluent. We apply this algorithm to show that each simple Lie…
In these notes, we describe several geometric interpretations of $H^2(X)$ when $X$ is a trisected 4-manifold. The main insight is that, by analogy with Hodge theory and sheaf cohomology in algebraic geometry, classes in $H^2(X)$ can be…
We obtain new invariants of topological link concordance and homology cobordism of 3-manifolds from Hirzebruch-type intersection form defects of towers of iterated p-covers. Our invariants can extract geometric information from an arbitrary…
We study trisections of 4-manifolds obtained by spinning and twist-spinning 3-manifolds, and we show that, given a (suitable) Heegaard diagram for the 3-manifold, one can perform simple local modifications to obtain a trisection diagram for…
In three-dimensional computational topology, the theory of normal surfaces is a tool of great theoretical and practical significance. Although this theory typically leads to exponential time algorithms, very little is known about how these…