Related papers: Practical Software for Triangulating and Simplifyi…

We study the set of all closed oriented smooth 4-manifolds experimentally, according to a suitable complexity defined using Turaev's shadows. This complexity roughly measures how complicated the 2-skeleton of the 4-manifold is. We…

This paper studies properly embedded surfaces in the 4-ball that are exotically knotted (i.e., topologically but not smoothly isotopic), and leverages this local phenomenon to study surfaces in larger 4-manifolds. The main results provide a…

In a small simply-connected closed 4-manifold, we construct infinitely many pairs of exotic codimension-$1$ submanifolds with diffeomorphic complements that remain exotic after any number of stabilizations by $ S^2 \times S^2$. We also give…

We describe a collection of constructions which illustrate a panoply of ``exotic'' smooth 4-manifolds.

We present a pair of smooth fiber bundles over the circle with a common $4$-dimensional fiber with the following properties: (1) their total spaces are diffeomorphic to each other; (2) they are isomorphic to each other as topological fiber…

A new lower bound on the complexity of a 3-manifold is given using the Z2-Thurston norm. This bound is shown to be sharp, and the minimal triangulations realising it are characterised using normal surfaces consisting entirely of…

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…

In the first part we survey some of the known results and conjectures on compact Hyperkaehler (HK) manifolds. In the second part we presents a program which aims to show that HK four-folds whose second cohomology (with 4-tuple cup-product)…

The problem of decomposing non-manifold object has already been studied in solid modeling. However, the few proposed solutions are limited to the problem of decomposing solids described through their boundaries. In this thesis we study the…

We explicitly construct small triangulations for a number of well-known 3-dimensional manifolds and give a brief outline of some aspects of the underlying theory of 3-manifolds and its historical development.

We study smooth, proper embeddings of noncompact surfaces in 4-manifolds, focusing on exotic planes and annuli, i.e., embeddings pairwise homeomorphic to the standard embeddings of R^2 and R^2-int D^2 in R^4. We encounter two uncountable…

This is a survey article about the connections between knot theory and four-dimensional topology. Every four-manifold can be represented in terms of a link, by a Kirby diagram. This point of view has led to progress in computing invariants…

We present a practical algorithm to test whether a 3-manifold given by a triangulation or an ideal triangulation contains a closed essential surface. This property has important theoretical and algorithmic consequences. As a testament to…

Gay and Kirby recently introduced the concept of a trisection for arbitrary smooth, oriented closed 4-manifolds, and with it a new topological invariant, called the trisection genus. This paper improves and implements an algorithm due to…

We introduce a simple cut-and-paste mechanism to construct both orientable and nonorientable four-manifolds from a given initial one. This mechanism alters the fundamental group while preserving other essential topological invariants. It…

This paper introduces even triangulations of n-dimensional pseudo-manifolds and links their combinatorics to the topology of the pseudo-manifolds. This is done via normal hypersurface theory and the study of certain symmetric…

In this paper, we will compute the dimension of the space of spun and ordinary normal surfaces in an ideal triangulation of the interior of a compact 3-manifold with incompressible tori or Klein bottle components. Spun normal surfaces have…

This article intends to provide an introduction to the construction of small exotic 4-manifolds. Some of the necessary background is covered. An exposition is given of J. Park's construction in arXiv:math.GT/0311395 of an exotic…

We study the relationship between exotic R^4's and Stein surfaces as it applies to smoothing theory on more general open 4-manifolds. In particular, we construct the first known examples of large exotic R^4's that embed in Stein surfaces.…

We present some applications of the Macaulay2 software package SpecialFanoFourfolds, a package for working with Hodge-special cubic fourfolds and Hodge-special Gushel--Mukai fourfolds. In particular, we show how to construct new examples of…