Related papers: A finiteness result for Heegaard splittings

For a genus $g$ Heegaard splitting of the $3$-sphere, the Goeritz group is defined to be the group of isotopy classes of diffeomorphisms of the $3$-sphere that preserve the splitting setwise. In this paper, we prove the following conjecture…

Let M_1 and M_2 be compact, orientable 3-manifolds with incompressible boundary, and M the manifold obtained by gluing with a homeomorphism $\phi:\bdy M_1 \to \bdy M_2$. We analyze the relationship between the sets of low genus Heegaard…

Let $M_1$ and $M_2$ be orientable irreducible 3--manifolds with connected boundary and suppose $\partial M_1\cong\partial M_2$. Let $M$ be a closed 3--manifold obtained by gluing $M_1$ to $M_2$ along the boundary. We show that if the gluing…

Recently Gay and Kirby described a new decomposition of smooth closed $4$-manifolds called a trisection. This paper generalises Heegaard splittings of $3$-manifolds and trisections of $4$-manifolds to all dimensions, using triangulations as…

We prove that if the fundamental group of an arbitrary three-manifold -- not necessarily closed, nor orientable -- is a Kaehler group, then it is either finite or the fundamental group of a closed orientable surface.

In this survey we discuss how geometric methods can be used to study topological properties of 3-manifolds such as their Heegaard genus or the rank of their fundamental group. On the other hand, we also discuss briefly some results relating…

We find a geometric invariant of isotopy classes of strongly irreducible Heegaard splittings of toroidal 3-manifolds. Combining this invariant with a theorem of R Weidmann, proved here in the appendix, we show that a closed, totally…

We define a Heegaard-Scharlemann-Thompson (HST) splitting of a 3-manifold M to be a sequence of pairwise-disjoint, embedded surfaces, {F_i}, such that for each odd value of i, F_i is a Heegaard splitting of the submanifold of M cobounded by…

Heegaard splittings provide a natural representation of closed 3-manifolds by gluing two handlebodies along a common surface. These splittings can be equivalently given by two finite sets of meridians lying on the surface, which define a…

We present a new proof of Reidemeister and Singer's Theorem that any two Heegaard splittings of the same 3-manifold have a common stabilization. The proof leads to an upper bound on the minimal genus of a common stabilization in terms of…

This paper presents a new proof of the Giroux Correspondence for tight contact $3$-manifolds using techniques from Heegaard splittings and convex surface theory. We introduce tight Heegaard splittings, which generalise the Heegaard…

We introduce the notion of a `canonical' splitting over Z or ZxZ for a finitely generated group G. We show that when G happens to be the fundamental group of an orientable Haken manifold M with incompressible boundary, then the…

We give several criteria on a closed, oriented 3-manifold that will imply that it is the boundary of a (simply connected) 4-manifold that admits infinitely many distinct smooth structures. We also show that any weakly fillable contact…

We show that the number of stabilizations needed to interchange the handlebodies of a Heegaard splitting of a closed 3-manifold by an isotopy is bounded below by the smaller of twice its genus or half its Hempel distance. This is a…

In a recent paper we defined a new filtration of the mapping class group--the "Lagrangian" filtration. We here determine the successive quotients of this filtration, up to finite index. As an application we show that, for any additive…

We define "fat" train tracks and use them to give a combinatorial criterion for the Hempel distance of Heegaard splittings for closed orientable 3-manifolds. We apply this criterion to 3-manifolds obtained from surgery on knots in the three…

We show that if two 3-manifolds with toroidal boundary are glued via a `sufficiently complicated' map then every Heegaard splitting of the resulting 3-manifold is weakly reducible. Additionally, if Z is a manifold obtained by gluing X and…

We prove that the non-separating curve complex of every surface of finite type and genus at least three admits an exhaustion by finite rigid sets.

The conditions for superintegrable systems in two-dimensional Euclidean space admitting separation of variables in an orthogonal coordinate system and a functionally independent third-order integral are studied. It is shown that only…

The disk complex of a surface in a 3-manifold is used to define its {\it topological index}. Surfaces with well-defined topological index are shown to generalize well-known classes, such as incompressible, strongly irreducible, and critical…