Related papers: Heegaard splittings, the virtually Haken conjectur…
We show that if the Hempel distance of a Heegaard splitting is larger than three then the mapping class group of the Heegaard splitting is isomorphic to a subgroup of the mapping class group of the ambient 3-manifold. This implies that…
Lei and Wu have given a description of the second homotopy group of a closed orientable 3-manifold in terms of the kernels of the epimorphisms from the fundamental group of a Heegaard splitting surface onto the fundamental groups of the two…
Given a closed 3--manifold $Y$, we show that the Heegaard Floer homology determines whether $Y$ fibres over the circle with a fibre of negative Euler characteristic. This is an analogue of an earlier result about knots proved by Ghiggini…
The elliptic 3-manifolds are the closed 3-manifolds that admit a Riemannian metric of constant positive curvature, that is, those that have finite fundamental group. The (Generalized) Smale Conjecture asserts that for any elliptic…
We prove that an irreducible 3-manifold whose fundamental group satisfies a certain group-theoretic property called RFRS is virtually fibered. As a corollary, we show that 3-dimensional reflection orbifolds and arithmetic hyperbolic…
The aim of this article is to introduce and study certain topological invariants for closed, oriented three-manifolds Y. These groups are relatively Z-graded Abelian groups associated to SpinC structures over Y. Given a genus g Heegaard…
We show that every p-fold strictly-cyclic branched covering of a b-bridge link in $S^3$ admits a p-symmetric Heegaard splitting - in the sense of Birman and Hilden - of genus $g=(b-1)(p-1)$. This gives a complete converse of one of the…
The Generalized Smale Conjecture asserts that if M is a closed 3-manifold with constant positive curvature, then the inclusion of the group of isometries into the group of diffeomorphisms is a homotopy equivalence. For the 3-sphere, this…
We prove hyperbolic 3-manifolds are geometrically inflexible: a unit quasiconformal deformation of a Kleinian group extends to an equivariant bi-Lipschitz diffeomorphism between quotients whose pointwise bi-Lipschitz constant decays…
It is well-known that Heegaard genus is additive under connected sum of 3-manifolds. We show that Heegaard genus of contact 3-manifolds is not necessarily additive under contact connected sum. We also prove some basic properties of the…
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…
We study random elements of subgroups (and cosets) of the mapping class group of a closed hyperbolic surface, in part through the properties of their mapping tori. In particular, we study the distribution of the homology of the mapping…
We show that hyperbolic 3-manifolds with finitely generated fundamental group are tame, that is the ends are products. We actually work in slightly greater generality with pinched negatively curved manifolds with hyperbolic cusps. This…
We prove that every cusped hyperbolic 3-manifold has a finite cover admitting infinitely many geometric ideal triangulations. Furthermore, every long Dehn filling of one cusp in this cover admits infinitely many geometric ideal…
Heegaard splittings stratify 3-manifolds by complexity; only $S^3$ admits a genus-zero splitting, and only $S^3$, $S^1 \times S^2$, and lens spaces $L(p,q)$ admit genus-one splittings. In dimension four, the second author and Jeffrey Meier…
Following on from work of Dunfield, we determine the fibred status of all the unknown hyperbolic 3-manifolds in the cusped census. We then find all the fibred hyperbolic 3-manifolds in the closed census and use this to find over 100…
Let M_1 and M_2 be compact, orientable 3-manifolds, and M the manifold obtained by gluing some component F of \bdy M_1 to some component of \bdy M_2 by a homeomorphism \phi. We show that when \phi is "sufficiently complicated" then (1) the…
In this paper, we will use Kahn-Markovic's almost totally geodesic surfaces to construct certain $\pi_1$-injective 2-complexes in closed hyperbolic 3-manifolds. Such 2-complexes are locally almost totally geodesic except along a…
We give the rectangle condition for strong irreducibility of Heegaard splittings of $3$-manifolds with non-empty boundary. We apply this to a generalized Heegaard splitting of a $2$-fold covering of $S^3$ branched along a link. The…
We introduce the concept of a homotopy motion of a subset in a manifold, and give a systematic study of homotopy motions of surfaces in closed orientable 3-manifolds. This notion arises from various natural problems in 3-manifold theory…