Related papers: Non-orientable slice surfaces and inscribed rectan…
This is an addendum to the paper of Braun and Fl{\o}ystad ([BF]) on the bound for the degree of a smooth surface in $\pfour$ not of general type. Using their construction and the regularity of curves in $\pthree$, one may lower the bound a…
We prove that strictly mean convex toroids contain infinitely many (geometrically distinct) embedded free boundary minimal M\"obius bands as well as infinitely many embedded free boundary minimal annuli. The surfaces in both families are…
A crown diagram of a smooth, closed oriented 4-manifold can be thought of as the projection of a link in the product of a closed surface and the circle, with chords in the circle direction connecting the strands of each crossing. This paper…
We investigate properties of spatial graphs on the standard torus. It is known that nontrivial embeddings of planar graphs in the torus contain a nontrivial knot or a nonsplit link due to [1],[2]. Building on this and using the chirality of…
We show that the problem of deciding whether a knot in a fixed closed orientable 3-dimensional manifold bounds a surface of genus at most $g$ is in co-NP. This answers a question of Agol, Hass, and Thurston in 2002. Previously, this was…
We study the space of slice-torus invariants. In particular we characterize the set of values that slice-torus invariants may take on a given knot in terms of the stable smooth slice genus. Our study reveals that the resolution of the local…
Knots and knotted fields enrich physical phenomena ranging from DNA and molecular chemistry to the vortices of fluid flows and textures of ordered media. Liquid crystals provide an ideal setting for exploring such topological phenomena…
This paper examines the relationship between the knotting of an embedded surface in $\R^3$ and the knotting of its fold curves, formed by the singular set of projection to a plane. The first result shows that every surface, no matter how…
This paper considers *-graphs in which all vertices have degree 4 or 6, and studies the question of calculating the genus of nonorientable surfaces into which such graphs may be embedded. In a previous paper by the authors, the problem of…
We provide three 3-dimensional characterizations of the Z-slice genus of a knot, the minimal genus of a locally-flat surface in 4-space cobounding the knot whose complement has cyclic fundamental group: in terms of balanced algebraic…
The A-polynomial of a knot is defined in terms of SL(2,C) representations of the knot group, and encodes information about essential surfaces in the knot complement. In 2005, Dunfield-Garoufalidis and Boyer-Zhang proved that it detects the…
The second part of the paper is devoted to enumeration of $r$-regular toroidal maps up to all homeomorphisms of the torus (unsensed maps). We describe in detail the periodic orientation reversing homeomorphisms of the torus which turn out…
We show that the problem of determining whether a knot in the 3-sphere is non-trivial lies in NP. This is a consequence of the following more general result. The problem of determining whether the Thurston norm of a second homology class in…
Very few examples of obstructed equsingular families of curves on surfaces other than the projective plane are known. Combining results from Westenberger and Hirano with an idea from math.AG/9802009 we give in the present paper series of…
In this paper we present the Braid Monodromy Type (BMT) of curves and surfaces; past, present and future. The BMT is an invariant that can distinguish between non-isotopic curves; between different families of surfaces of general type;…
The twisted torus knots lie on the standard genus 2 Heegaard surface for $S^3$, as do the primitive/primitive and primitive/Seifert knots. It is known that primitive/primitive knots are fibered, and that not all primitive/Seifert knots are…
If a knot K bounds a genus one Seifert surface F in the 3-sphere and F contains an essential simple closed curve alpha that has induced framing 0 and is smoothly slice, then K is smoothly slice. Conjecturally, the converse holds. It is…
A nontrivial $\theta$-curve in $S^3$ is Brunnian if each of its cycles is the unknot. We show that if the exterior of a Brunnian $\theta$-curve is atoroidal, then it does not contain an essential annulus. Previously, Ozawa-Tsutsumi showed…
In this paper we refine the main result of a previous paper of the author with Grimeland on derived invariants of surface algebras. We restrict to the case where the surface is a torus with one boundary component and give an easily…
We investigate the complexity of finding an embedded non-orientable surface of Euler genus $g$ in a triangulated $3$-manifold. This problem occurs both as a natural question in low-dimensional topology, and as a first non-trivial instance…