Related papers: A unique decomposition theorem for tight contact 3…

Whether every hyperbolic 3-manifold admits a tight contact structure or not is an open question. Many hyperbolic 3-manifolds contain taut foliations and taut foliations can be perturbed to tight contact structures. The first examples of…

The first goal of this paper is to construct examples of higher dimensional contact manifolds with specific properties. Our main results in this direction are the existence of tight virtually overtwisted closed contact manifolds in all…

It is conjectured that every cusped hyperbolic 3-manifold has a decomposition into positive volume ideal hyperbolic tetrahedra (a "geometric" triangulation of the manifold). Under a mild homology assumption on the manifold we construct…

The intersection matrix of a finite simplicial complex has as each of its entries the rank of the intersection of its respective simplices. We prove that such matrix defines the triangulation of a closed connected surface up to isomorphism.

Two of the basic questions in contact topology are which manifolds admit tight contact structures, and on those that do, can we classify such structures. We present the first such classification on an infinite family of (mostly) hyperbolic…

We prove the following result: Let $(\mathcal{O},g_0)$ be a complete, connected 3-orbifold with uniformly positive scalar curvature, with bounded geometry, and containing no bad 2-suborbifolds. Then there is a finite collection…

David Gabai showed that disk decomposable knot and link complements carry taut foliations of depth one. In an arbitrary sutured 3-manifold M, such foliations F, if they exist at all, are determined up to isotopy by an associated ray [F]…

A theorem of Mumford states that, on complex surfaces, any normal isolated singularity whose link is diffeomorphic to a sphere is actually a smooth point. While this property fails in higher dimensions, McLean asks whether the contact…

The work of Jorgensen and Thurston shows that there is a finite number N(v) of orientable hyperbolic 3-manifolds with any given volume v. We show that there is an infinite sequence of closed orientable hyperbolic 3-manifolds, obtained by…

We prove that there is a knot $K$ transverse to $\xi_{std}$, the tight contact structure of $S^3$, such that every contact 3-manifold $(M, \xi)$ can be obtained as a contact covering branched along $K$. By contact covering we mean a map…

In the first part of this paper we revisit a classical topological theorem by Tischler (1970) and deduce a topological result about compact manifolds admitting a set of independent closed forms proving that the manifold is a fibration over…

It is well known that every compact oriented 3-manifold admits an ideal triangulation, and that any two such triangulations with at least two ideal tetrahedra are related by a sequence of Pachner $2$-$3$ moves. Motivated by constructions in…

We introduce a new technique for finding CAT(-1) surfaces in hyperbolic 3-manifolds. We use this to show that a complete hyperbolic 3-manifold with finitely generated fundamental group is geometrically and topologically tame.

We give a short proof of Scharlemann's Strong Haken Theorem for closed $3$-manifolds (and manifolds with spherical boundary). As an application, we also show that given a decomposing sphere $R$ for a $3$-manifold $M$ that splits off an $S^2…

We define an invariant, which we call surface-complexity, of closed 3-manifolds by means of Dehn surfaces. The surface-complexity of a manifold is a natural number measuring how much the manifold is complicated. We prove that it fulfils…

Let X be a complex Fano-manifolds with second Betti-number 1 which carries a contact structure. It follows from previous work that such a manifold can always be covered by lines. Thus, it seems natural to consider the geometry of lines in…

We study the asymptotics of the number N(t) of geometrically distinct closed geodesics of a Riemannian or Finsler metric on a connected sum of two compact manifolds of dimension at least three with non-trivial fundamental groups and apply…

We give an algorithm for working out the indecomposable direct summands in a Krull--Schmidt decomposition of a tensor product of two simple modules for G=SL_3 in characteristics 2 and 3. It is shown that there is a finite family of modules…

We survey the interactions between foliations and contact structures in dimension three, with an emphasis on sutured manifolds and invariants of sutured contact manifolds. This paper contains two original results: the fact that a closed…

We prove that the fundamental group of any Seifert 3-manifold is conjugacy separable. That is, conjugates may be distinguished in finite quotients or, equivalently, conjugacy classes are closed in the pro-finite topology.