Related papers: Thin position and essential planar surfaces

It has been shown recently that a nonrelativistic quantum particle constrained to a hard-wall layer of constant width built over a geodesically complete simply connected noncompact curved surface can have bound states provided the surface…

Recently a simple proof of the generalizations of Hawking's black hole topology theorem and its application to topological black holes for higher dimensional ($n\geq 4$) spacetimes was given \cite{rnew}. By applying the associated new line…

We prove a conjecture of Toponogov on complete convex planes, namely that such planes must contain an umbilic point, albeit at infinity. Our proof is indirect. It uses Fredholm regularity of an associated Riemann-Hilbert boundary value…

A persistent lamination for a knot K is an essential lamination in the complement of K, which remains essential after every non-trivial Dehn surgery along K. Having a persistent lamination implies, for example, that every manifold obtained…

We collect some results in combinatorial geometry that follow from an inequality of Langer in algebraic geometry. Langer's inequality gives a lower bound on the number of incidences between a point set and its spanned lines, and was…

We generalize the idea of unknotting knots to Seifert surfaces. We define an operation called ribbon twist which serves as the equivalent of a crossing change for knots. A Seifert surface is considered untwisted, the equivalent to…

Tightness of a triangulated manifold is a topological condition, roughly meaning that any simplexwise linear embedding of the triangulation into euclidean space is "as convex as possible". It can thus be understood as a generalization of…

We give a method for searching for thin positions of a given link.

Final revision. To appear in the Journal of Differential Geometry. This paper studies knots that are transversal to the standard contact structure in $\reals^3$, bringing techniques from topological knot theory to bear on their transversal…

Roberts proved that a family of alternating, arborescent, prime knots each have at least $2^{2n-1}$ distinct minimal genus Seifert surfaces, where $n$ is the genus of the knot in question. We give a subfamily of these knots that have…

We use an extension of Gordon-Litherland pairing to thickened surfaces to give a topological characterization of alternating links in thickened surfaces. If $\Sigma$ is a closed oriented surface and $F$ is a compact unoriented surface in…

Suppose $K$ is a knot in a closed 3-manifold $M$ such that $\bar{M-N(K)}$ is irreducible. We show that for any positive integer $b$ there exists a triangulation of $\bar{M-N(K)}$ such that any weakly incompressible bridge surface for $K$ of…

We provide an alternative, simpler proof of the existence of thick triangulations for noncompact $\mathcal{C}^1$ manifolds. Moreover, this proof is simpler than the original one given in \cite{pe}, since it mainly uses tools of elementary…

This paper presents a new algorithm "A" for constructing Seifert surfaces from n-bridge projections of links. The algorithm produces minimal complexity surfaces for large classes of braids and alternating links. In addition, we consider a…

Let $F$ be a non-zero polynomial with integer coefficients in $N$ variables of degree $M$. We prove the existence of an integral point of small height at which $F$ does not vanish. Our basic bound depends on $N$ and $M$ only. We separately…

We show that an $(n+1)$-bridge sphere for the unknot is a topologically minimal surface of index at most $n$.

In this thesis, we consider the thin-film equation with nonlinear surface tension term in one space dimension. Relying on the corresponding energy and entropy estimates, we prove existence of weak solutions as well as nonnegativity results.

We consider compact connected minimal surfaces, with a pair of boundary curves (not necessarily convex) in distinct planes, that have least-area amongst all orientable surfaces with the same boundary. When the planes containing these two…

We describe a normal surface algorithm that decides whether a knot, with known degree of the colored Jones polynomial, satisfies the Strong Slope Conjecture. We also discuss possible simplifications of our algorithm and state related open…

The objective of this article is to prove the necessity statement in Crawley-Boevey's conjectural solution to the (tame) Deligne-Simpson problem. We use the nonabelian Hodge correspondence, variation of parabolic weights and results of…