Related papers: A Presentation of the Mapping Class Groups
This book provides a self-contained introduction to the topology and geometry of surfaces and three-manifolds. The main goal is to describe Thurston's geometrisation of three-manifolds, proved by Perelman in 2002. The book is divided into…
We show that the morphisms from the braid group with n strands in the mapping class group of a surface with a possible non empty boundary, assuming that its genus is smaller or equal to n/2 are either cyclic morphisms (their images are…
We give a short, mostly elementary and self-contained proof of the classical result that the groups of diffeomorphisms, homeomorphisms, and homotopy equivalences of a surface have the same group of connected components.
Finite presentations for the mapping class group M(F) are known for arbitrary orientable compact surface F. If F is non-orientable, then such presentations are known only when F has genus at most 3 and few boundary components. In this paper…
The $d$-fold ($d \geq 3$) branched coverings on a disk give an infinite family of nongeometric embeddings of braid groups into mapping class groups. We, in this paper, give new explicit expressions of these braid group representations into…
Hamilton in the course of his studies on quaternions came up with an elegant geometric picture for the group SU(2). In this picture the group elements are represented by ``turns'', which are equivalence classes of directed great circle arcs…
Dilation surfaces, or twisted quadratic differentials, are variants of translation surfaces. In this paper, we study the question of what elements or subgroups of the mapping class group can be realized as affine automorphisms of dilation…
The generalized Dehn twist along a closed curve in an oriented surface is an algebraic construction which involves intersections of loops in the surface. It is defined as an automorphism of the Malcev completion of the fundamental group of…
In this paper, we give presentations of the mapping class groups of marked surfaces stabilizing boundaries for any genus. Note that in the existing works, the mapping class groups of marked surfaces were the isotopy classes of…
We compute the topological mapping class group of every compact, simply connected, topological 4-manifold. This was previously only known in the closed case. If the 4-manifold is smooth, we deduce an analogous description of the stable…
The periodic Floer homology of a surface symplectomorphism, defined by the first author and M. Thaddeus, is the homology of a chain complex which is generated by certain unions of periodic orbits, and whose differential counts certain…
We obtain a finite generating set for the level 2 twist subgroup of the mapping class group of a closed non-orientable surface. The generating set consists of crosscap pushing maps along non-separating two-sided simple loops and squares of…
Let T(N) be the subgroup of the mapping class group of a nonorientable surface N (possibly with punctures and/or boundary components) generated by twists about two-sided circles. We obtain a simple generating set for T(N). As an application…
The hyperelliptic Torelli group is the subgroup of the mapping class group consisting of elements that act trivially on the homology of the surface and that also commute with some fixed hyperelliptic involution. We prove a Birman exact…
Motivated by conjectures relating group orderability, Floer homology, and taut foliations, we discuss a systematic and broadly applicable technique for constructing left-orders on the fundamental groups of rational homology 3-spheres.…
A 1930s conjecture of Hopf states that an even-dimensional compact Riemannian manifold with positive sectional curvature has positive Euler characteristic. We prove this conjecture under the additional assumption that the isometry group has…
We express the rational cohomology of the unordered configuration space of a compact oriented manifold as a representation of its mapping class group in terms of a weight-decomposition of the rational cohomology of the mapping space from…
We construct several families of embeddings of braid groups into mapping class groups of orientable and non-orientable surfaces and prove that they induce the trivial map in stable homology in the orientable case, but not so in the…
In previous work we constructed twisted representations of mapping class groups of surfaces, depending on a choice of representation $V$ of the Heisenberg group $\mathcal{H}$. For certain $V$ we were able to untwist these mapping class…
We prove that the hyperelliptic Torelli group is generated by Dehn twists about separating curves that are preserved by the hyperelliptic involution. This verifies a conjecture of Hain. The hyperelliptic Torelli group can be identified with…