Related papers: The number of smooth 4-manifolds with a fixed comp…

Examples are given to show that some compact contractible 4-manifolds can be knotted in the 4-sphere. It is then proved that any finitely presented perfect group with a balanced presentation is a knot group for an embedding of some…

For each n greater than 7 we explicitly construct a sequence of Stein manifolds diffeomorphic to complex affine space of dimension n so that there is no algorithm to tell us in general whether a given such Stein manifold is symplectomorphic…

We will prove that the number of deformation equivalence classes of surfaces homotopy equivalent to a smooth, closed 4-manifold is finite, if the first Betti number is equal to one, and the second Betti number is equal to zero.

In this paper we investigate the relationship between isotopy classes of knots and links in S^3 and the diffeomorphism types of homeomorphic smooth 4-manifolds. As a corollary of this initial investigation, we begin to uncover the…

We study a family of birational maps of smooth affine quadric 3-folds, {over the complex numbers}, of the form $x_1x_4-x_2x_3=$ constant, which seems to have some (among many others) interesting/unexpected characters: a) they are…

We demonstrate the existence of numerous non-spin 4-manifolds for which the smooth Nielsen realization problem fails; namely, there exist finite subgroups of their mapping class groups that cannot be realized by any group of…

Topological complexity is a numerical homotopy invariant that measures the instability of motion planning in a space. To study the topological complexity of non-simply connected spaces, Costa and Farber introduced a cohomology class whose…

We prove a surgery formula for the ordinary Seiberg-Witten invariants of smooth $4$-manifolds with $b_1 =1$. Our formula expresses the Seiberg-Witten invariants of the manifold after the surgery, in terms of the original Seiberg-Witten…

We study smooth proper embeddings of compact orientable surfaces in compact orientable $4$-manifolds and elements in the mapping class group of that surface which are induced by diffeomorphisms of the ambient $4$-manifolds. We call such…

In this paper we construct the space of smooth 4-manifolds and find the homotopy model for the connected components of the complement to the discriminant. The discriminant of this space is a singular hypersurface and its generic points…

We extend the notion of (smooth) stable generalized complex structures to allow for an anticanonical section with normal self-crossing singularities. This weakening not only allows for a number of natural examples in higher dimensions but…

We give necessary and sufficient conditions for a closed smooth 6-manifold N to be diffeomorphic to a product of a surface F and a simply connected 4-manifold M in terms of basic invariants like the fundamental group and cohomological data.…

We construct an infinite family of simply connected, pairwise nondiffeomorphic 4-manifolds, all homeomorphic to 3CP^2 blown up at 9 points.

Closed oriented 4-manifolds with the same geometrically 2-dimensional fundamental group (satisfying certain properties) are classified up to $s$-cobordism by their $w_2$-type, equivariant intersection form and the Kirby-Siebenmann…

We say that two knots are friends if they share the same 0-surgery. Two friends with different sliceness status would provide a counterexample to the 4-dimensional smooth Poincar\'e conjecture. Here we create a census of all friends with…

A flat cover is a collection of flats identifying the non-bases of a matroid. We introduce the notion of cover complexity, the minimal size of such a flat cover, as a measure for the complexity of a matroid, and present bounds on the number…

Akbulut has recently shown that an infinite family of Cappell-Shaneson homotopy 4-spheres is diffeomorphic to the standard 4-sphere. In the present paper, a strictly larger family is shown to be standard by a simpler method. This new…

For every algebraically closed field $k$ and natural number $r$, we construct several algebraic varieties (over $k$) whose birational automorphism group contains every finite nilpotent group of class at most $2$, rank at most $r$ whose…

We extend the notion of basic classes (for the Donaldson invariants) to 4-manifolds with $b^+>1$ which are (potentially) not of simple type or satisfy $b_1 >0$. We also give a structure theorem for the Donaldson invariants of 4-manifolds…

An oriented compact closed manifold is called inflexible if the set of mapping degrees ranging over all continuous self-maps is finite. Inflexible manifolds have become of importance in the theory of functorial semi-norms on homology.…