Related papers: Rational blow-downs and smoothings of surface sing…
Koll\'ar gave a series of examples of rational surfaces of Picard number $1$ with ample canonical divisor having cyclic singularities. In this paper, we construct several series of new examples in a geometric way, i.e., by blowing up…
We show that a complex normal surface singularity admitting a contracting automorphism is necessarily quasihomogeneous. We also describe the geometry of a compact complex surface arising as the orbit space of such a contracting…
We present a general regularization procedure for piecewise smooth vector fields whose discontinuity locus is a variety of normal crossings type. We show that such regularization can be smoothed through a finite sequence of blowings-up,…
Real blow-up, including inhomogeneous versions, of boundary faces of a manifold (with corners) is an important tool for resolving singularities, degeneracies and competing notions of homogeneity. These constructions are shown to be…
We construct k-parameter families of rational surface automorphisms for any k. These are automorphisms of surfaces X, which are constructed from iterated blowups over the projective plane. In certain cases: we are able to determine the…
The normal connected sum construction of Gompf and the rational blowing-down technique of Fintushel - Stern are important tools in constructing symplectic 4-manifolds. In some cases, the 4-manifolds created this way are of Kahler type. In…
This expository talk is an expanded version of a lecture at G.-M. Greuel's 60th Birthday Conference in Kaiserslautern in October, 2004. We survey recent work of Neumann-Wahl and others on the relation between topology and geometry of normal…
Given a singular foliation, we attach an "essential isotropy" group to each of its leaves, and show that its discreteness is the integrability obstruction of a natural Lie algebroid over the leaf. We show that a condition ensuring…
We consider a conjectured topological inequality for the number of equisingular moduli of a rational surface singularity, and prove it in some natural special cases. When the resolution dual graph is "sufficiently negative" (in a precise…
A complex algebraic surface $S$ is a $\mathbb{Q}$-homology plane if $H_{i}(S,\mathbb{Q})=0$ for $i>0$. The Negativity Conjecture of Palka asserts that $\kappa(K_{X}+\tfrac{1}{2}D)=-\infty$, where $(X,D)$ is a log smooth completion of $S$.…
In recent work, we introduced topological notions of simple normal crossings symplectic divisor and variety, showed that they are equivalent, in a suitable sense, to the corresponding geometric notions, and established a topological…
In this paper we look for necessary and sufficient conditions for a genus one fibration to have rational curves. We show that a projective variety with log terminal singularities that admits a relatively minimal genus one fibration…
A Q-homology plane is a normal complex algebraic surface having trivial rational homology. We obtain a structure theorem for Q-homology planes with smooth locus of non-general type. We show that if a Q-homology plane contains a non-quotient…
The Separatrix Theorem of C. Camacho and P. Sad guarantees the existence of invariant curve (separatrix) passing through the singularity of germ of holomorphic foliation on complex surface, when the surface underlying the foliation is…
We describe smooth rational projective algebraic surfaces over an algebraically closed field of characteristic different from 2 which contain $n \ge \b_2-2$ disjoint smooth rational curves with self-intersection -2, where $\b_2$ is the…
We introduce several new families of relations in the mapping class groups of planar surfaces, each equating two products of right-handed Dehn twists. The interest of these relations lies in their geometric interpretation in terms of…
For any negative definite plumbed 3-manifold M we construct from its plumbed graph a graded Z[U]-module. This, for rational homology spheres, conjecturally equals the Heegaard-Floer homology of Ozsvath and Szabo, but it has even more…
A theorem, giving necessary and sufficient condition for naked singularity formation in spherically symmetric non static spacetimes under hypotheses of physical acceptability, is formulated and proved. The theorem relates existence of…
The families of smooth rational surfaces in $\PP^4$ have been classified in degree $\le 10$. All known rational surfaces in $\PP^4$ can be represented as blow-ups of the plane $\PP^2$. The fine classification of these surfaces consists of…
The paper is devoted to metric properties of singularities. We investigate the relations among topology, metric properties and smoothness. In particular, we present some higher dimensional analogous of Mumford's theorem on smoothness of…