Related papers: 2-Normal Surfaces

Any two homologous surfaces of the same genus embedded in a smooth 4-manifold X with simply-connected complements are shown to be smoothly isotopic in the connected sum of X and the product of a 2-sphere with itself, if the surfaces are…

Beyond normal surfaces there are several open questions concerning 2- dimensional spaces. We present some results and conjectures along this line.

We introduce canonical principal parameters on any strongly regular minimal surface in the three dimensional sphere and prove that any such a surface is determined up to a motion by its normal curvature function satisfying the Sinh-Poisson…

In this thesis, we use normal surface theory to understand certain properties of minimal triangulations of compact orientable 3-manifolds. We describe the collapsing process of normal 2-spheres and disks. Using some geometrical…

Given $2n$ unit equilateral triangles, there are finitely many ways to glue each edge to a partner. We obtain a random sphere-homeomorphic surface by sampling uniformly from the gluings that produce a topological sphere. As $n$ tends to…

We interpret a normal surface in a (singular) three-manifold in terms of the homology of a chain complex. This allows us to study the relation between normal surfaces and their quadrilateral co-ordinates. Specifically, we give a proof of an…

Haken showed that the Heegaard splittings of reducible 3-manifolds are reducible, that is, a reducing 2-sphere can be found which intersects the Heegaard surface in a single simple closed curve. When the genus of the "interesting" surface…

A topologically minimal surface may be isotoped into a normal form with respect to a fixed triangulation. If the intersection with each tetrahedron is simply connected, then the pieces of this normal form are triangles, quadrilaterals, and…

Let M be a compact connected orientable 3-manifold, with non-empty boundary that contains no 2-spheres. We investigate the existence of two properly embedded disjoint surfaces S_1 and S_2 such that M - (S_1 \cup S_2) is connected. We show…

Normal surface theory is a central tool in algorithmic three-dimensional topology, and the enumeration of vertex normal surfaces is the computational bottleneck in many important algorithms. However, it is not well understood how the number…

Critical surfaces are defined by Bachman as topological index 2 surfaces, generalizing incompressible surfaces and strongly irreducible surfaces. In this paper we give a condition to obtain critical Heegaard surfaces by amalgamation. As a…

We study minimal surfaces in generic sub-Riemannian manifolds with sub-Riemannian structures of co-rank one. These surfaces can be defined as the critical points of the so-called {\it horizontal} area functional associated to the canonical…

Normal surface theory, a tool to represent surfaces in a triangulated 3-manifold combinatorially, is ubiquitous in computational 3-manifold theory. In this paper, we investigate a relaxed notion of normal surfaces where we remove the…

A well-known result of Walsh states that if $\mathcal T^*$ is an ideal triangulation of an atoroidal, acylindrical, irreducible, compact 3-manifold with torus boundary components, then every properly embedded, two-sided, incompressible…

Minimal surfaces are ubiquitous in nature. Here they are considered as geometric objects that bear a deformation content. By refining the resolution of the surface deformation gradient afforded by the polar decomposition theorem, we…

We present a simple proof of the surface classification theorem using normal curves. This proof is analogous to Kneser's and Milnor's proof of the existence and uniqueness of the prime decomposition of 3-manifolds. In particular, we do not…

We consider the natural problem of counting isotopy classes of essential surfaces in 3-manifolds, focusing on closed essential surfaces in a broad class of hyperbolic 3-manifolds. Our main result is that the count of (possibly disconnected)…

We show that there are a finite number of possible pictures for a surface in a tetrahedron with local index $n$. Combined with previous results, this establishes that any topologically minimal surface can be transformed into one with a…

Let M be the interior of a compact 3-manifold with non-empty boundary, and T be an ideal (topological) triangulation of M. This paper describes necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of angle structures, semi-angle structures…

A family of one-vertex triangulations of 3-manifolds, layered-triangulations, is defined. Layered-triangulations are first described for handlebodies and then extended to all 3-manifolds via Heegaard splittings. A complete and detailed…