Related papers: Proximity in the curve complex: boundary reduction…

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…

This article is the author's contribution to the volume "Problems on mapping class groups and related topics" which will be published in December 2006, with Benson Farb as Editor. Various individuals were invited by Farb to submit open…

This article investigates the subject of rigid compact complex manifolds. First of all we investigate the different notions of rigidity (local rigidity, global rigidity, infinitesimal rigidity, etale rigidity and strong rigidity) and the…

We generalize the following result of White: Suppose $N$ is a compact, strictly convex domain in $\RR^3$ with smooth boundary. Let $\Sigma$ be a compact 2-manifold with boundary. Then a generic smooth curve $\Gamma\cong \partial\Sigma$ in…

We consider closed acylindrical surfaces in 3-manifolds and in knot and link complements, and show that the genus of these surfaces is bounded linearly by the number of tetrahedra in the triangulation of the manifold and by the number of…

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…

We show that for any given closed orientable 3-manifold M with a Heegaard surface of genus g, any positive integers b and n, there exists a knot K in M which admits a (g,b)-bridge splitting of distance greater than n with respect to the…

J. Hempel's definition of the distance of a Heegaard surface generalizes to a complexity for a knot which is in bridge position with respect to a Heegaard surface. Our main result is that the distance of a knot in bridge position is bounded…

If $X$ is a compact set, a {\it topological contraction} is a self-embedding $f$ such that the intersection of the successive images $f^k(X)$, $k>0$, consists of one point. In dimension 3, we prove that there are smooth topological…

Let (V,W;F) be a weakly reducible, unstabilized, genus three Heegaard splitting in an orientable, irreducible 3-manifold M. In this article, we prove that either the disk complex D(F) is contractible or F is critical. Hence, the topological…

We show that if C is a simple closed curve bounding an embedded disk in a closed 3-manifold M, then there exists a disk D in M with boundary C such that D minimizes the area among the embedded disks with boundary C. Moreover, D is smooth,…

We show if M is a closed, connected, orientable, hyperbolic 3-manifold with Heegaard genus g then g >= 1/2 cosh(r) where r denotes the radius of any isometrically embedded ball in M. Assuming an unpublished result of Pitts and Rubinstein…

Let S be the boundary of a handlebody M. We prove that the set of curves in S that are boundaries of disks in M, considered as a subset of the complex of curves of S, is quasi-convex.

It is well known that every quasi-Fuchsian manifold admits at least one closed incompressible minimal surface, and at most finitely many of them. In this paper, for any prescribed integer $N>0$, we construct a quasi-Fuchsian manifold which…

We prove that there is an algorithm which determines whether or not a given 2-polyhedron can be embedded into some integral homology 3-sphere. This is a corollary of the following main result. Let $M$ be a compact connected orientable…

We consider irreducible 3-manifolds M that arise as knot complements in closed 3-manifolds and that contain at most two connected strict essential surfaces. The results in the paper relate the boundary slopes of the two surfaces to their…

Quantum invariants in low dimensional topology offer a wide variety of valuable invariants of knots and 3-manifolds, presented by explicit formulas that are readily computable. Their computational complexity has been actively studied and is…

Let $Y_1$ be a closed, oriented 3-manifold and $\Sigma$ denote a non-separating closed, orientable surface in $Y_1$ which consists of two connected components of the same genus. By cutting $Y_1$ along $\Sigma$ and re-gluing it using an…

We prove that if S is a properly embedded incompressible surface in a compact 3-manifold M, then the fundamental group of S is separable in the fundamental group of M.

We consider surfaces embedded in a 3D contact sub-Riemannian manifold and the problem of the finiteness of the induced distance (i.e., the infimum of the length of horizontal curves that belong to the surface). Recently it has been proved…