Related papers: Spaces of Incompressible Surfaces

For most aspherical Seifert-fibered 3-manifolds $M$, the space of Seifert fiberings $SF(M)$ is known to have contractible components. It is also known that the space of Hopf fiberings of the three-sphere is noncontractible. We provide the…

Let M be a closed orientable Seifert fibered 3-manifold with a hyperbolic base 2-orbifold, or equivalently, admitting a geometry modeled on H^2 \times R or the universal cover of SL(2,R). Our main result is that the connected component of…

The disk complex of a surface in a 3-manifold is used to define its {\it topological index}. Surfaces with well-defined topological index are shown to generalize well-known classes, such as incompressible, strongly irreducible, and critical…

We find a geometric invariant of isotopy classes of strongly irreducible Heegaard splittings of toroidal 3-manifolds. Combining this invariant with a theorem of R Weidmann, proved here in the appendix, we show that a closed, totally…

This is the third in a series of papers constructing hyperbolic structures on all Haken three-manifolds. This portion deals with the mixed case of the deformation space for manifolds with incompressible boundary that are not acylindrical,…

It was proven in the first author's paper "Contact 3-manifolds twenty years since J. Martinet's work" (Ann. Inst. Fourier, 42(1992), 165--192) that any tight contact structure on the 3-sphere is diffeomorphic to the standard one. It was…

This paper initiates a systematic study of the relation of commensurability of surface automorphisms, or equivalently, fibered commensurability of 3-manifolds fibering over the circle. We show that every hyperbolic fibered commensurability…

We show that any noncompact oriented surface is homeomorphic to the leaf of a minimal foliation of a closed $3$-manifold. These foliations are (or are covered by) suspensions of continuous minimal actions of surface groups on the circle.…

The elliptic 3-manifolds are the closed 3-manifolds that admit a Riemannian metric of constant positive curvature, that is, those that have finite fundamental group. The (Generalized) Smale Conjecture asserts that for any elliptic…

In a 1983 paper with Frank Warner, we proved that the space of all great circle fibrations of the 3-sphere S^3 deformation retracts to the subspace of Hopf fibrations, and so has the homotopy type of a pair of disjoint two-spheres. Since…

A Heegaard splitting of a $3$-manifold is flippable if there is an isotopy that interchanges the two sides of the Heegaard splitting. We explore which Heegaard splittings of Seifert fibered spaces are flippable.

This article has two purposes. In \cite{R3} (math.KT/0405211) we showed that the FIC (Fibered Isomorphism Conjecture for pseudoisotopy functor) for a particular class of 3-manifolds (we denoted this class by \cal C) is the key to prove the…

A Seifert manifold is a 3-dimensional manifold with a circle action. It is a circle bundle (with singularities) over a 2-dimensional orbifold. In this note, we discuss a generalized Seifert manifolds. By definition, they have bundle-like…

We classify all closed, aspherical Riemannian manifolds M whose universal cover has indiscrete isometry group. One sample application is the theorem that any such M with word-hyperbolic fundamental group must be isometric to a negatively…

This paper gives a proof that the universal cover of a closed 3-manifold built from three $\pi_1$-injective handlebodies is homeomorphic to $\mathbb R^3$. This construction is an extension to handlebodies of the conditions for gluing of…

We prove that the Teichm\"uller space of the Hirsch foliation (a minimal foliation of a closed 3-manifold by non-compact hyperbolic surfaces) is homeomorphic to the space of closed curves in the plane. This allows us to show that that the…

We show that the moduli space of all smooth fibrations of a three-sphere by simple closed curves has the homotopy type of a disjoint union of a pair of two-spheres if the fibers are oriented, and of a pair of real projective planes if…

We use thin position of Heegaard splittings to give a new proof of Haken's Lemma that a Heegaard surface of a reducible manifold is reducible and of Scharlemann's ``Strong Haken Theorem'': a Heegaard surface for a 3-manifold may be isotoped…

Let $(M,g)$ be a closed oriented Riemannian $3$-manifold and suppose that there is a strongly irreducible Heegaard splitting $H$. We prove that $H$ is either isotopic to a minimal surface of index at most one or isotopic to the stable…

Around 1960, R. Palais and J. Cerf proved a fundamental result relating spaces of diffeomorphisms and imbeddings of manifolds: If V is a submanifold of M, then the map from Diff(M) to Imb(V,M) that takes f to its restriction to V is locally…