Related papers: Topology of 3-manifolds and a class of groups
This is a continuation of an earlier preprint (math.GT/0209121) under the same title. These papers grew out of an attempt to find a suitable finite sheeted covering of an aspherical 3-manifold so that the cover either has infinite or…
This is a first in a series of papers, devoted to the relation betwwen three-manifolds and number fields. The present paper studies first homology of finite coverings of a three-manifold with primary interest in the Thurston $b_1$…
We study the first homology group of the mapping class group and Torelli group with coefficients in the first rational homology group of the universal abelian cover of the surface. We prove two contrasting results: for surfaces with one…
A 3-manifold is Haken if it contains a topologically essential surface. The Virtual Haken Conjecture posits that every irreducible 3-manifold with infinite fundamental group has a finite cover which is Haken. In this paper, we study random…
In this paper it is proven that if the group of covering translations of the covering space of a compact, connected, $P^2$-irreducible 3-manifold corresponding to a non-trivial, finitely-generated subgroup of its fundamental group is…
A theory of finite type invariants for arbitrary compact oriented 3-manifolds is proposed, and illustrated through many examples arising from both classical and quantum topology. The theory is seen to be highly non-trivial even for…
In this paper we construct explicit examples of both closed and non-compact finite volume hyperbolic manifolds which provide counterexamples to the conjecture that the co-rank of a 3-manifold group (also known as the cut number) is bounded…
We show that the Thurston seminorms of all finite covers of an aspherical 3-manifold determine whether it is a graph manifold, a mixed 3-manifold or hyperbolic.
One method for obtaining every closed orientable 3-manifold is as branched covering of the 3-sphere over a link. There is a classical topological result showing that the minimun possible number of sheets in the covering is three. In this…
We give a complete proof of Thurston's Orbifold Theorem for very good 3-orbifolds of cyclic type. An orbifold is said to be very good when it has a finite cover which is a manifold. A 3-orbifold is of cyclic type if the singular set is a…
We study the action of the mapping class group on the real homology of finite covers of a topological surface. We use the homological representation of the mapping class to construct a faithful infinite-dimensional representation of the…
Given a reducible $3$-manifold $M$ with an aspherical summand in its prime decomposition and a homeomorphism $f\colon M\to M$, we construct a map of degree one from a finite cover of $M\rtimes_f S^1$ to a mapping torus of a certain…
We prove that for every closed, connected, orientable, irreducible 3-manifold, there exists an alternating group A_n which is not the topological symmetry group of any graph embedded in the manifold. We also show that for every finite group…
We apply the theory of finite-type invariants of homology 3-spheres to investigate the structure of the Torelli group. We construct natural cocycles in the Torelli group and show that the lower central series quotients of the Torelli group…
A topology is defined on the mapping class group of a compact connected orientable surface. It is shown that a notion of "genericity" on subsets of the mapping class group arises from this definition. Many plausible results follow from this…
Garoufalidis and Levine introduced the homology cobordism group of homology cylinders over a surface. This group can be regarded as a generalization of the mapping class group. Using torsion invariants, we show that the abelianization of…
Using the recently developed theory of finite type invariants of integral homology 3-spheres we study the structure of the Torelli group of a closed surface. Explicitly, we construct (a) natural cocycles of the Torelli group (with…
In this paper, we survey recent works on the structure of the mapping class groups of surfaces mainly from the point of view of topology. We then discuss several possible directions for future research. These include the relation between…
We exhibit a closed hyperbolic 3-manifold which satisfies a very strong form of Thurston's Virtual Fibration Conjecture. In particular, this manifold has finite covers which fiber over the circle in arbitrarily many ways. More precisely, it…
We give a necessary and sufficient condition for the mapping class group of the pair of the 3-sphere and a graph embedded in it to be isomorphic to the topological symmetry group of the embedded graph.