Related papers: Smooth Euclidean 4-spaces with few symmetries
A strategy for constructing an embedded sphere in a 4-manifold realizing a given homology class which has been successfully applied in the past is to represent the class as a first step stably by an embedded sphere, i.e. after adding…
There are known infinite families of Brieskorn homology 3-spheres which can be realized as boundaries of smooth contractible 4-manifolds. In this paper we show that free periodic actions on these Brieskorn spheres do not extend smoothly…
We point out that recent constructions of inequivalent smooth structures yield a manufacturing procedure of infinite sets of pairwise smoothly non-isotopic nullhomologous 2-tori and spheres inside a myriad of 4-manifolds. The corresponding…
We study the continuous motion of smooth isometric embeddings of a planar surface in three-dimensional Euclidean space, and two related discrete analogues of these embeddings, polygonal embeddings and flat foldings without interior…
The medial axis of a smoothly embedded surface in $\mathbb{R}^3$ consists of all points for which the Euclidean distance function on the surface has at least two minima. We generalize this notion to the mid-sphere axis, which consists of…
We study a notion of strict pseudoconvexity in the context of topologically (often unsmoothably) embedded 3-manifolds in complex surfaces. Topologically pseudoconvex (TPC) 3-manifolds behave similarly to their smooth analogues, cutting out…
Moduli spaces of points on $n$-spheres carry natural actions of braid groups. For $n=0$, $1$, and $3$, we prove that these symmetries extend to actions of mapping class groups of positive genus surfaces, by establishing exceptional…
We construct infinitely many smooth oriented 4-manifolds containing pairs of homotopic, smoothly embedded 2-spheres that are not topologically isotopic, but that are equivalent by an ambient diffeomorphism inducing the identity on homology.…
A fold map is a smooth map at each singular point of which it is represented as the product map of a Morse function and the identity map on an open ball. A special generic map is a fold map such that the Morse function can be taken as a…
We show that if a compact, oriented 4-manifold admits a coassociative-free immersion into the Euclidean 7-space then its Euler characteristic and signature vanish. Moreover, in the spin case the Gauss map is contractible, so that the…
We show that there exist smooth, simply connected, four-dimensional spin manifolds which do not admit Einstein metrics, but nonetheless satisfy the strict Hitchin-Thorpe inequality. Our construction makes use of the Bauer/Furuta cohomotopy…
M. Freedman showed that every homology 3-sphere embeds as a locally flat submanifold of $S^4$. This is in striking contrast to the state of our knowledge of smooth embeddings of homology spheres. This book surveys what is presently known…
An upper bound on the first S^1 invariant eigenvalue of the Laplacian for invariant metrics on the 2-sphere is used to find obstructions to the existence of isometric embeddings of such metrics in (R^3,can). As a corollary we prove: If the…
In this note we establish the existence of a new type of rigidity of symplectic embeddings coming from obligatory intersections with symplectic planes. More precisely, we prove that if a Euclidean ball is symplectically embedded in the…
A spherical quadrilateral is a bordered surface homeomorphic to a closed disk, with four distinguished boundary points called corners, equipped with a Riemannian metric of constant curvature 1, except at the corners, and such that the…
We construct algebraic families of exotic affine 3-spheres, that is, smooth affine threefolds diffeomorphic to a non-degenerate smooth complex affine quadric of dimension 3 but non algebraically isomorphic to it. We show in particular that…
Following Ghomi and Tabachnikov we study topological obstructions to totally skew embeddings of a smooth manifold M in Euclidean spaces. This problem is naturally related to the question of estimating the geometric dimension of the stable…
We show that standard cyclic actions on Brieskorn homology 3-spheres with non-empty fixed set do not extend smoothly to any contractible smooth 4-manifold it may bound. The quotient of any such extension would be an acyclic $4$-manifold…
We calculate the Seiberg-Witten invariants of branched covers of prime degree, where the branch locus consists of embedded spheres. Aside from the formula itself, our calculations give rise to some new constraints on configurations of…
We construct infinite families of topologically isotopic but smoothly distinct knotted spheres in many simply connected 4-manifolds that become smoothly isotopic after stabilizing by connected summing with $S^2 \times S^2$, and as a…