Related papers: On embedding all $n$-manifolds into a single $(n+1…
These notes are adapted from two talks given at the 2004 Clay Institute Summer School on Floer homology, gauge theory, and low dimensional topology at the Alfred Renyi Institute. We will quickly review what we do and do not know about the…
An oriented closed connected N-manifold M is inflexible if it does not admit self-maps of unbounded degree. In addition, if all the maps from any other oriented closed connected N-manifold have bounded degree, then M is said to be strongly…
There are only 10 Euclidean forms, that is flat closed three dimensional manifolds: six are orientable and four are non-orientable. The aim of this paper is to describe all types of $n$-fold coverings over orientable Euclidean manifolds…
Let the circle act effectively in a Hamiltonian fashion on a compact symplectic manifold $(M, \omega)$. Assume that the fixed point set $M^{S^1}$ has exactly two components, $X$ and $Y$, and that $\dim(X) + \dim(Y) +2 = \dim(M)$. We first…
It is proved that any smooth manifold $\mathcal M$ of dimension $m$ admits a smooth polynomially convex embedding into $\mathbb C^n$ when $n\geq \lfloor 5m/4\rfloor$. Further, such embeddings are dense in the space of smooth maps from…
In any dimension at least five we construct examples of closed smooth manifolds with the following properties: 1) they have neither real projective nor flat conformal structures; 2) their fundamental group is a non-elementary Gromov…
Every 4-dimensional infrasolvmanifold $M$ with $\beta_1(M;\mathbb{Q})>0$ or which is flat or has one of the geometries $\mathbb{N}il^4$, $\mathbb{S}ol_{m,n}^4$, or $\mathbb{S}ol_0^4$ bounds. However there are non-orientable…
We show that any topological, closed, oriented, non-spin $4$-manifold with fundamental group $\mathbb{Z}_{4k}$ and $\min(b_2^+, b_2^-)\geq 15$, has either none or infinitely many distinct smooth structures. Furthermore, we construct…
We provide new branched covering representations for bounded and/or non-compact 4-manifolds, which extend the known ones for closed 4-manifolds. Assuming $M$ to be a connected oriented PL 4-manifold, our main results are the following: (1)…
We study the continuous motion of smooth isometric embeddings of a planar surface in three-dimensional Euclidean space, and two related discrete analogues of these embeddings, polygonal embeddings and flat foldings without interior…
We show that there exists an algorithm that takes as input two closed, simply connected, topological 4-manifolds and decides whether or not these 4-manifolds are homeomorphic. In particular, we explain in detail how closed, simply…
We describe a procedure to construct infinite sets of pairwise smoothly inequivalent 2-spheres in simply connected 4-manifolds, which are topologically isotopic and whose complement has a prescribed fundamental group that satisfies some…
We discuss embedding of manifolds in the category of open books, contact manifolds and contact open books. We prove an open book version of the Haefliger--Hirsch embedding theorem by showing that every $k$-connected closed $n$-manifold…
The totally-real embeddability of any $2k$-dimensional compact manifold $M$ into $\mathbb C^n$, $n\geq 3k$, has several consequences: the genericity of polynomially convex embeddings of $M$ into $\mathbb C^n$, the existence of $n$ smooth…
We show that every smooth closed oriented four-manifold admits a decomposition into two co- dimension zero submanifolds with common boundary. Each of these submanifolds carries a structure of a symplectic manifold with pseudo-convex…
We obtain bounds on the least dimension of an affine space that can contain an $n$-dimensional submanifold without any pairs of parallel or intersecting tangent lines at distinct points. This problem is closely related to the generalized…
We study smooth, proper embeddings of noncompact surfaces in 4-manifolds, focusing on exotic planes and annuli, i.e., embeddings pairwise homeomorphic to the standard embeddings of R^2 and R^2-int D^2 in R^4. We encounter two uncountable…
Every 1-connected topological 4-manifold M admits a $S^{1}$-covering by $#_{r-1}S^{2}\times S^{3}$, where $r=$rank$H^{2}(M;\QTR{Bbb}{Z})$.
A smooth map between manifolds is said to be \emph{image simple} if its restriction to its singular point set is a topological embedding. We study the parity of the number of connected components of the singular point set for image simple…
We construct examples of non-formal simply connected and compact oriented manifolds of any dimension bigger or equal to 7.