Related papers: Exotically knotted disks and complex curves
Examples are given to show that some compact contractible 4-manifolds can be knotted in the 4-sphere. It is then proved that any finitely presented perfect group with a balanced presentation is a knot group for an embedding of some…
We initiate the study of exotic Dehn twists along 3-manifolds $\neq S^3$ inside $4$-manifolds, which produces the first known examples of exotic diffeomorphisms of contractible 4-manifolds, more generally of definite 4-manifolds, and exotic…
In this paper we study embeddings of oriented connected closed surfaces in $\mathbb S^3$. We define a complete invariant, the fundamental span, for such embeddings, generalizing the notion of the peripheral system of a knot group. From the…
We study the inertia groups of some smooth rational curves on 2-elementary K3 surfaces and singular K3 surfaces from the view of topological entropy, with an application to a long standing open question of Coble on the inertia group of a…
A fold map is a smooth map at each singular point of which it is represented as the product map of a Morse function and the identity map on an open ball. A special generic map is a fold map such that the Morse function can be taken as a…
Classes of branched surfaces extend the classes of surfaces or 2-dimensional manifolds satisfying suitable properties and defined in various manners. Reeb spaces of smooth maps of suitable classes into surfaces whose codimensions are…
We study exotic smoothings of open 4-manifolds using the minimal genus function and its analog for end homology. While traditional techniques in open 4-manifold smoothing theory give no control of minimal genera, we make progress by using…
Despite spectacular advances in defining invariants for simply connected smooth and symplectic 4-dimensional manifolds and the discovery of effective surgical techniques, we still have been unable to classify simply connected smooth…
We study the geometry of surfaces in $\mathbb R^5$ by relating it to the geometry of regular and singular surfaces in $\mathbb R^4$ obtained by orthogonal projections. In particular, we obtain relations between asymptotic directions, which…
If M is a manifold with compressible boundary, we analyze essential disks in M, as well as incompressible, but not necessarily boundary incompressible, surfaces in M. We are most interested in the case where M is a handlebody or compression…
We solve the stabilized symplectic embedding problem for four-dimensional ellipsoids into the four-dimensional round ball. The answer is neatly encoded by a piecewise smooth function which exhibits a phase transition from an infinite…
In this paper we make a first step toward determining 4-dimensional data from higher dimensional superstring theory and considering these as underlying structures for the theory. First, we explore connections of exotic smoothings of R^4 and…
We give several criteria on a closed, oriented 3-manifold that will imply that it is the boundary of a (simply connected) 4-manifold that admits infinitely many distinct smooth structures. We also show that any weakly fillable contact…
Closed (and simply-connected) manifolds whose dimensions are greater than 4 are classified via sophisticated algebraic and abstract theory such as surgery theory and homotopy theory. It is difficult to handle 3 or 4-dimensional closed…
The classical knot groups are the fundamental groups of the complements of smooth or piecewise-linear (PL) locally-flat knots. For PL knots that are not locally-flat, there is a pair of interesting groups to study: the fundamental group of…
In this paper we construct a family of simply connected, spin, non-complex, symplectic 4-manifolds which cover all but finitely many allowed lattice points $(\chi, c)$ lying in $0 \leq c \leq 8.76\chi$. Furthermore, as a corollary, we prove…
Log-symplectic structures are Poisson structures that are determined by a symplectic form with logarithmic singularities. We construct moduli spaces of curves with values in a log-symplectic manifold. Among the applications, we classify…
In [HT], two of us constructed a closed oriented 4-dimensional manifold with fundamental group $\Z$ that does not split off $S^1\times S^3$. In this note we show that this 4-manifold, and various others derived from it, do not admit smooth…
This paper addresses several isotopy problems on $4$-manifolds. First, we classify the isotopy classes of embeddings of $\Sigma$ in $\Sigma\times S^2$ that are geometrically dual to $\{\mbox{pt}\}\times S^2$, where $\Sigma$ is a closed…
A 4-manifold is constructed with some curious metric properties; or maybe it is many 4-manifolds masquerading as one, which would explain why it looks curious. Anyway, knots in the 3-sphere with complete finite volume hyperbolic metrics on…