Related papers: Genus two Heegaard splittings of orientable three-…

A family of one-vertex triangulations of 3-manifolds, layered-triangulations, is defined. Layered-triangulations are first described for handlebodies and then extended to all 3-manifolds via Heegaard splittings. A complete and detailed…

We construct families of pairs of Heegaard splittings that must be stabilized several times to become equivalent. The first such pair differs only by their orientation. These are genus n splittings of a closed 3-manifold that must be…

The Heegaard genus g of an irreducible closed orientable 3-manifold puts a limit on the number and complexity of the pieces that arise in the Jaco-Shalen-Johannson decomposition of the manifold by its canonical tori. For example, if p of…

Haken showed that the Heegaard splittings of reducible 3-manifolds are reducible, that is, a reducing 2-sphere can be found which intersects the Heegaard surface in a single simple closed curve. When the genus of the "interesting" surface…

We show that the number of stabilizations needed to interchange the handlebodies of a Heegaard splitting of a closed 3-manifold by an isotopy is bounded below by the smaller of twice its genus or half its Hempel distance. This is a…

We prove that the mapping class groups of the genus 3 Heegaard splittings of the connected sum of two lens spaces are finitely generated, and the corresponding reducing sphere complexes are all connected.

The mapping class group of a Heegaard splitting is the group of connected components in the set of automorphisms of the ambient manifold that map the Heegaard surface onto itself. For the genus three Heegaard splitting of the 3-torus, we…

We give a necessary and sufficient condition for a simple closed curve on the boundary of a genus two handlebody to decompose the handlebody into (torus with one boundary component times [0,1]. We use this condition to decide whether a…

We give a simple criterion for a Heegaard splitting to yield a Haken manifold. As a consequence, we construct many Haken manifolds, in particular homology spheres, with prescribed properties, namely Heegaard genus, Heegaard distance and…

Lei and Wu have given a description of the second homotopy group of a closed orientable 3-manifold in terms of the kernels of the epimorphisms from the fundamental group of a Heegaard splitting surface onto the fundamental groups of the two…

The equivariant Heegaard genus of a 3-manifold $M$ with the action of a finite group $G$ of diffeomorphisms is the smallest genus of an equivariant Heegaard splitting for $M$. Although a Heegaard splitting of a reducible manifold is…

We use technology from sutured manifold theory and the theory of Heegaard splittings to relate genus reducing crossing changes on knots in S^3 to twists on surfaces arising in circular Heegaard splittings for knot complements. In a separate…

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…

We propose a way to derive polynomial invariants of closed, orientable $3$-manifolds from Heegaard diagrams via cellularly embedded graphs. Given a Heegaard diagram of an irreducible $3$-manifold $M$, we associate a Heegaard graph $G\subset…

We give a new elementary proof of the parallelizability of closed orientable 3-manifolds. We use as the main tool the fact that any such manifold admits a Heegaard splitting.

We give a new perspective of Heegaard splittings in terms square complexes and Guirardel's notion of a \textit{core} which allows for combinatorial measurement of the obstruction to being a connect sum of Heegaard diagrams. A Heegaard…

This paper generalizes the definition of a Heegaard splitting to unify Scharlemann and Thomspon's concept of thin position for 3-manifolds, Gabai's thin position for knots, and Rubinstein's almost normal surface theory. This gives…

A Heegaard diagram for a 3-manifold is regarded as a pair of simplexes in the complex of curves on a surface and a Heegaard splitting as a pair of subcomplexes generated by the equivalent diagrams. We relate geometric and combinatorial…

We show that the number of genus $g$ embedded minimal surfaces in $\mathbb{S}^3$ tends to infinity as $g\rightarrow\infty$. The surfaces we construct resemble doublings of the Clifford torus with curvature blowing up along torus knots as…

This article is the author's contribution to the volume "Problems on mapping class groups and related topics" which will be published in December 2006, with Benson Farb as Editor. Various individuals were invited by Farb to submit open…