Related papers: On Stiefel's parallelizability of 3-manifolds

We present two proofs that all closed, orientable 3-manifolds are parallelisable. Both are based on the Lickorish-Wallace surgery presentation; one proof uses a refinement due to Kaplan and some basic contact geometry. This complements a…

We survey, complete, and modify a proof, involving knot theory, of Stiefel's theorem that all orientable $3$-manifolds are parallelizable. The completion of the proof is done by using the relationship between the tangent bundle and normal…

We give an elementary proof of the fact that any orientable 3-manifold admits a framing (i.e. is parallelizable) and any non-orientable 3-manifold admits a projective framing. The proof uses only basic facts about immersions of surfaces in…

After surveying existing proofs that every closed, orientable 3-manifold is parallelizable, we give three proofs using minimal background. In particular, our proofs use neither spin structures nor the theory of Stiefel-Whitney classes.

Generalizing Heegaard splittings of 3-manifolds and trisections of 4-manifolds, we consider multisections of higher-dimensional smooth (or PL) closed orientable manifolds, namely decompositions into 1-handlebodies whose subcollections…

In this paper we give a method to construct Heegaard splittings of oriented graph manifolds with orientable bases. A graph manifold is a closed $3$-manifold admitting only Seifert-fibered pieces in its Jaco-Shalen decomposition; for…

A famous example of Casson and Gordon shows that a Haken 3-manifold can have an infinite family of irreducible Heegaard splittings with different genera. In this paper, we prove that a closed non-Haken 3-manifold has only finitely many…

We construct examples of closed non-Haken hyperbolic 3-manifolds with a Heegaard splitting of arbitrarily large distance.

We show that a smooth embedding of a closed 3-manifold in S^3 x R can be isotoped so that every generic level divides S^3 x t into two handlebodies (i.e., is Heegaard) provided the original embedding has a unique local maximum with respect…

A Heegaard diagram for a 3-manifold is regarded as a pair of simplexes in the complex of curves on a surface and a Heegaard splitting as a pair of subcomplexes generated by the equivalent diagrams. We relate geometric and combinatorial…

In the paper we prove that every closed orientable three-manifold admits a parabolic foliation.

A Heegaard splitting of a $3$-manifold is flippable if there is an isotopy that interchanges the two sides of the Heegaard splitting. We explore which Heegaard splittings of Seifert fibered spaces are flippable.

We give an algorithmic proof of the theorem that a closed orientable irreducible and atoroidal 3-manifold has only finitely many Heegaard splittings in each genus, up to isotopy. The proof gives an algorithm to determine the Heegaard genus…

The long standing classification problem in the theory of Heegaard splittings of 3-manifolds is to exhibit for each closed 3-manifold a complete list, without duplication, of all its irreducible Heegaard surfaces, up to isotopy. We solve…

We construct families of pairs of Heegaard splittings that must be stabilized several times to become equivalent. The first such pair differs only by their orientation. These are genus n splittings of a closed 3-manifold that must be…

We describe an example of a closed orientable 3-manifold with distinct distance three genus two Heegaard splittings. This demonstrates that the constructions of alternate genus two Heegaard splittings of closed orientable 3-manifolds…

We introduce the concept of a handlebody decomposition of a 3-manifold, a generalization of a Heegaard splitting, or a trisection. We show that two handlebody decompositions of a closed orientable 3-manifold are stably equivalent. As an…

We present new explicit decompositions of manifolds via so-called fold maps into lower dimensional spaces. Fold maps form a nice class of so-called generic maps, generalizing Morse functions naturally. To understand the topologies and the…

Our earlier twisted-face-pairing construction showed how to modify an arbitrary orientation-reversing face-pairing on a faceted 3-ball in a mechanical way so that the quotient is automatically a closed, orientable 3-manifold. The…

We give a combinatorial proof of a theorem first proved by Souto which says the following. Let M_1 and M_2 be simple 3-manifolds with connected boundary of genus g>0. If M_1 and M_2 are glued via a complicated map, then every minimal…