Related papers: Acylindrical surfaces in 3-manifolds and knot comp…
In a lens space X of order r a knot K representing an element of the fundamental group pi_1 X = Z/rZ of order s <= r contains a connected orientable surface S properly embedded in its exterior X-N(K) such that the boundary of S intersects…
We show that any knot which is smoothly the closure of a 3-braid cannot be Lagrangian concordant to and from the maximum Thurston-Bennequin Legendrian unknot except the unknot itself. Our obstruction comes from drawing the Weinstein…
The contents of this 6-page paper have been subsumed into the 13-page paper, "A note on closed 3-braids", arXiv:0802.1072 [math.GT]. This paper is correct, but contains less information than the new one. The topological classification of…
We consider a Heegaard splitting M=H_1 \cup_S H_2 of a 3-manifold M having an essential disk D in H_1 and an essential surface F in H_2 with |D \cap F|=1. (We require that boundary of F is in S when H_2 is a compressionbody with non-empty…
Heegaard splittings stratify 3-manifolds by complexity; only $S^3$ admits a genus-zero splitting, and only $S^3$, $S^1 \times S^2$, and lens spaces $L(p,q)$ admit genus-one splittings. In dimension four, the second author and Jeffrey Meier…
Given a closed hyperbolic 3-manifold $M$, we construct a tower of covers with increasing Heegaard genus, and give an explicit lower bound on the Heegaard genus of such covers as a function of their degree. Using similar methods we prove…
In terms of the number of triangles, it is known that there are more than exponentially many triangulations of surfaces, but only exponentially many triangulations of surfaces with bounded genus. In this paper we provide a first geometric…
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)…
In this article, we prove that the commensurability class of a closed, orientable, hyperbolic 3-manifold is determined by the surface subgroups of its fundamental group. Moreover, we prove that there can be only finitely many closed,…
We define a 2-normal surface to be one which intersects every 3-simplex of a triangulated 3-manifold in normal triangles and quadrilaterals, with one or two exceptions. The possible exceptions are a pair of octagons, a pair of unknotted…
We solve the Bonnet problem for surfaces in the homogeneous 3-manifolds with a 4-dimensional isometry group. More specifically, we show that a simply connected real analytic surface in H^2xR or S^2xR is uniquely determined pointwise by its…
We generalize the results of [AS], finding large classes of totally geodesic Seifert surfaces in hyperbolic knot and link complements, each the lift of a rigid 2-orbifold embedded in some hyperbolic 3-orbifold. In addition, we provide a…
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…
This elementary article introduces easy-to-manage invariants of genus one knots in homology 3-spheres. To prove their invariance, we investigate properties of an invariant of 3-dimensional genus two homology handlebodies called the…
We show that a strongly irreducible and boundary-strongly irreducible surface can be isotoped to be almost normal in a triangulated 3-manifold.
We describe an action of the concordance group of knots in the three-sphere on concordances of knots in arbitrary 3-manifolds. As an application we define the notion of almost-concordance between knots. After some basic results, we prove…
We consider manifold-knot pairs $(Y,K)$ where $Y$ is a homology sphere that bounds a homology ball. We show that the minimum genus of a PL surface $\Sigma$ in a homology ball $X$ such that $\partial (X, \Sigma) = (Y, K)$ can be arbitrarily…
Let $M =\mathbb{H}^3/\Gamma$ be a finite-volume, noncompact hyperbolic 3-manifold. We show that the number of quasi-Fuchsian surface subgroups of $\Gamma$ (up to conjugacy and commensurability) of genus at most $g$ is bounded both above and…
We construct a system of 33 essential simple closed curves that are pairwise non-homotopic and intersect at most once on the oriented, closed surface of genus 3. Moreover, we show that our construction is saturated, in the sense that it is…
Motivated by the L-space conjecture, we investigate various notions of order-detection of slopes on knot manifolds. These notions are designed to characterise when rational homology 3-spheres obtained by gluing compact manifolds along torus…