几何拓扑

Covering moves relate colored link diagrams appearing as the branch sets of simple branched coverings of $S^3$ by the same 3-manifold. We provide a complete set of covering moves on plat closures of braids in each fixed degree $d \geq 4$,…

Kreck's modified surgery gives an approach to classifying smooth $2n$-manifolds up to stable diffeomorphism, i.e. up to connected sum with copies of $S^n \times S^n$. In dimension 4, we use a combination of modified and classical surgery to…

A key result in computational 3-manifold topology is that any two triangulations of the same 3-manifold are connected by a finite sequence of bistellar flips, also known as Pachner moves. One limitation of this result is that little is…

The bending map of a hyperbolic 3-manifold with boundary maps a geometrically hyperbolic metric to its bending measured geodesic lamination. We show that the bending map is proper. As a byproduct of the proof we show that the group of…

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…

Let $K$ be a nontrivial knot. For each $n\in \mathbb{N}$, we prove that the rank of its $n$th iterated Whitehead doubled knot group $\pi_1(S^3 \setminus \operatorname{WD}^n(K))$ is bounded below by $n+1$. As an application, we show that…

A family of compact n-manifolds is locally combinatorially defined (LCD) if it can be specified by a finite number of local triangulations. We show that LCD is equivalent to the existence of a compact branched n-manifold W, such that the…

We exhibit an infinite family of indecomposable Klein bottles in the 4-sphere with order-4 meridians.

For any knot $K$ in $S^3$ and any positive rational $r$, we show that smooth $(-r)$-surgery on $K$ always admits a tight contact structure. More specifically, the tightness is detected by the non-vanishing Heegaard Floer contact invariant.

Bonded knots arise naturally in topological protein modeling, where intramolecular interactions such as disulfide bridges stabilize folded configurations. These structures extend classical knot theory by incorporating embedded graphs, and…

We review recent progress on two closely related sets of questions concerning convex co-compact hyperbolic manifolds, or convex domains in those manifolds, such as their convex core. The first set of questions is to what extent the…

We prove that there exist infinitely many contractible compact smooth $4$-manifolds $C$ that admit absolutely exotic diffeomorphisms of infinite order in $\pi_0(\mathrm{Diff}(C))$. By ``absolutely", we mean that isotopies are not required…

For any homotopy class h in any compact orientable 3-manifold M which is closed or has exclusively torus boundary components, we produce infinitely many pairs of distinct knots representing h with orientation-preserving homeomorphic…

We construct a variant of Khovanov skein lasagna modules, which takes the Khovanov homology in connected sums of $S^1\times S^2$ defined by Rozansky and Willis as the input link homology. To carry out the construction, we prove…

Given a genus $g$ smooth Lefschetz fibration $\pi : M \to S^2$ with singular locus $\Delta \subseteq S^2$, we describe the subgroup $\operatorname{Br}(\pi)$ of the spherical braid group $\operatorname{Mod}(S^2,\Delta)$ consisting of braids…

We define the symmetric braid index $b_s(K)$ of a ribbon knot $K$ to be the smallest index of a braid whose closure yields a symmetric union diagram of $K$, and derive a Khovanov-homological characterisation of knots with $b_s(K)$ at most…

We construct efficient topological cobordisms between torus links and large connected sums of trefoil knots. As an application, we show that the signature invariant $\sigma_\omega$ at $\omega=\zeta_6$ takes essentially minimal values on…

For any smooth manifold $M$ of dimension $d\geq4$ we construct explicit classes in homotopy groups of spaces of embeddings of either an arc or a circle into $M$, in every degree that is a multiple of $d-3$, and show that they are detected…

We give a family of slice-torus invariants $\tilde{ss}_c$, each defined from the $c$-divisibility of the reduced Lee class in a variant of reduced Khovanov homology, parameterized by prime elements $c$ in any principal ideal domain $R$. For…

For a 4-manifold $M$ and a knot $k\colon\mathbb{S}^1\hookrightarrow\partial M$ with dual sphere $G\colon\mathbb{S}^2\hookrightarrow\partial M$, we compute the set $\mathbb{D}(M;k)$ of smooth isotopy classes of neat embeddings…