Related papers: Heegaard surfaces and measured laminations, II: no…
Suppose that a three-manifold M contains infinitely many distinct strongly irreducible Heegaard splittings H + nK, obtained by Haken summing the surface H with n copies of the surface K. We show that K is incompressible. All known examples,…
We give a proof of the so-called generalized Waldhausen conjecture, which says that an orientable irreducible atoroidal 3-manifold has only finitely many Heegaard splittings in each genus, up to isotopy. Jaco and Rubinstein have announced a…
Non-isotopic Heegaard splittings of non-minimal genus were known previously only for very special 3-manifolds. We show in this paper that they are in fact a wide spread phenomenon in 3-manifold theory: We exhibit a large class of knots and…
The main result is a short effective proof of Tao Li's theorem that a closed non Haken hyperbolic 3-manifold N has at most finitely many irreducible Heegaard splittings.
Colding and Gabai have given an effective version of Li's theorem that non-Haken hyperbolic 3-manifolds have finitely many irreducible Heegaard splittings. As a corollary of their work, we show that Haken hyperbolic 3-manifolds have a…
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…
A Heegaard splitting of an open 3-manifold is the partition of the manifold into two non-compact handlebodies which intersect on their common boundary. This paper proves several non-compact analogues of theorems about compact Heegaard…
We give an algorithmic proof of the theorem that a closed orientable irreducible and atoroidal 3-manifold has only finitely many Heegaard splittings in each genus, up to isotopy. The proof gives an algorithm to determine the Heegaard genus…
The long standing classification problem in the theory of Heegaard splittings of 3-manifolds is to exhibit for each closed 3-manifold a complete list, without duplication, of all its irreducible Heegaard surfaces, up to isotopy. We solve…
We use thin position of Heegaard splittings to give a new proof of Haken's Lemma that a Heegaard surface of a reducible manifold is reducible and of Scharlemann's ``Strong Haken Theorem'': a Heegaard surface for a 3-manifold may be isotoped…
In this paper, we give infinitely many non-Haken hyperbolic genus three 3-manifolds each of which has a finite cover whose induced Heegaard surface from some genus three Heegaard surface of the base manifold is reducible but can be…
We construct families of pairs of Heegaard splittings that must be stabilized several times to become equivalent. The first such pair differs only by their orientation. These are genus n splittings of a closed 3-manifold that must be…
We construct examples of closed non-Haken hyperbolic 3-manifolds with a Heegaard splitting of arbitrarily large distance.
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…
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…
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…
Let $(M,g)$ be a closed oriented Riemannian $3$-manifold and suppose that there is a strongly irreducible Heegaard splitting $H$. We prove that $H$ is either isotopic to a minimal surface of index at most one or isotopic to the stable…
We give another proof of a theorem of Scharlemann and Tomova and of a theorem of Hartshorn. The two theorems together say the following. Let M be a compact orientable irreducible 3--manifold and P a Heegaard surface of M. Suppose Q is…
A gap in a paper of Rubinstein-Scharlemann is explored: new examples are found of closed orientable 3-manifolds with possibly multiple genus 2 Heegaard splittings. Properties common to all the examples in the original paper are not…
Let M be a 3-manifold admitting a strongly irreducible Heegaard surface S and f:M \to M an involution. We construct an invariant Heegaard surface for M of genus at most 8 g(S) - 7. As a consequence, given a (possibly branched) double cover…