Related papers: Non-split, alternating links bound unique Seifert …
We provide an infinite family of diffeomorphic symplectic forms on ruled surfaces, which are pairwise non-isotopic. This answers a uniqueness question regarding symplectic structures up to isotopy on closed symplectic four-manifolds.
Some generalizations and variations of the Fintushel-Stern rim surgery are known to produce smoothly knotted surfaces. We show that if the fundamental groups of their complements are cyclic, then these surfaces are topologically unknotted.…
We introduce and study a class of compact 4-manifolds with boundary that we call protocorks. Any exotic pair of simply connected closed 4-manifolds is related by a protocork twist, moreover, any cork is supported by a protocork. We prove a…
We introduce decorated piecewise hyperbolic and spherical surfaces and discuss their discrete conformal equivalence. A decoration is a choice of circle about each vertex of the surface. Our decorated surfaces are closely related to…
We say that a topological $n$-manifold $N$ is a cubical $n$-manifold if it is contained in the $n$-skeleton of the canonical cubulation $\mathcal{C}$ of ${\mathbb{R}}^{n+k}$ ($k\geq1$). In this paper, we prove that any closed, oriented…
The topology and symmetry group of a free boundary minimal surface in the three-dimensional Euclidean unit ball do not determine the surface uniquely. We provide pairs of non-isometric free boundary minimal surfaces having any sufficiently…
We give a new proof of an isoperimetric inequality for a family of closed surfaces, which have Gaussian curvature identically equal to one wherever the surface is smooth. These surfaces are formed from a convex, spherical polygon, with each…
We study smooth proper embeddings of compact orientable surfaces in compact orientable $4$-manifolds and elements in the mapping class group of that surface which are induced by diffeomorphisms of the ambient $4$-manifolds. We call such…
We present several structural results on closed, nonorientable, smooth $4$--manifolds, extending analogous results and machinery for the orientable case. We prove the existence of simplified broken Lefschetz fibrations and simplified…
We use rudiments of the Seiberg-Witten gluing theory for trivial circle bundles over a Riemann surface to relate de Seiberg-Witten basic classes of two $4$-manifolds containing Riemann surfaces of the same genus and self-intersection zero…
We prove that if two cusped hyperbolic $3$-manifolds admit a regular isomorphism between the profinite completions of their fundamental groups, then they share the same $A$-polynomial and their strongly detected boundary slopes match up.
We show that there exists a link with 2 components which is not smoothly slice in $\mathbb{CP}^2 \# \overline{\mathbb{CP}^2}$. By contrast, it is well-known that every knot (i.e., link with 1 component) is smoothly slice therein. Our proof…
We show how to construct absolutely exotic smooth structures on compact 4-manifolds with boundary, including contractible manifolds. In particular, we prove that any compact smooth 4-manifold W with boundary that admits a relatively exotic…
We define \emph{piecewise rank 1} manifolds, which are aspherical manifolds that generally do not admit a nonpositively curved metric but can be decomposed into pieces that are diffeomorphic to finite volume, irreducible, locally symmetric,…
We show that no exotic $\mathbb{R}^4$ admits a complete Riemannian metric with uniformly positive isotropic curvature and with bounded geometry. This is essentially a corollary of the main result in [Hu1], and was stated in [Hu2] without…
Nontrivial infinitesimal bendings for a class of two-dimensional surfaces are constructed. The surfaces considered here are orientable; compact; with boundary; have positive curvature everywhere except at finitely many planar points; and…
In this paper, we extend our investigation of the class of biconservative surfaces with non-constant mean curvature in 4-dimensional space forms $N^4(\epsilon)$. Specifically, we focus on biconservative surfaces with non-parallel normalized…
When considering regularity of surfaces, it is its geometry that is of interest. Thus, the concept of geometric regularity or geometric continuity of a specific order is a relevant concept. In this paper we discuss necessary and sufficient…
We discuss an obstruction to a knot being smoothly slice that comes from minimum-genus bounds on smoothly embedded surfaces in definite 4-manifolds. As an example, we provide an alternate proof of the fact that the (2,1)-cable of the figure…
We study the Seifert surfaces of a link by relating the embeddings of graphs by using induced graphs. As applications, we prove that every link $L$ is the boundary of an oriented surface which is obtained from a graph embedding of a…