arXiv research

Short proof of Strong Haken Theorem for 3-manifolds.

Proves Thurston's bounded image theorem for Haken manifolds.

New proof of Haken's Lemma and Scharlemann's theorem using thin position.

We define the class of Haken $n$--manifolds as a generalisation of Haken 3--manifolds. We prove that the interior of the universal covering of a Haken $n$--manifold is $\RR^n$, which generalises a result of Waldhausen. The techniques used allow us to provide a new proof of Waldhausen's universal cover theorem for Haken…

Three great theorems of Thurston read: Haken manifolds are hyperbolic; big ramified coverings are hyperbolic; big surgeries are hyperbolic. Recent developments indicate that the later two theorems are essentially a corollary of the first, that is there are much more Haken manifolds than expected by Thurston. In fact Fr…

Understanding non-Haken 3-manifolds is central to many current endeavors in 3-manifold topology. We describe some results for closed orientable surfaces in non-Haken manifolds, and extend Fox's theorem for submanifolds of the 3-sphere to submanifolds of general non-Haken manifolds. In the case where the submanifold has…

The main result is a short effective proof of Tao Li's theorem that a closed non Haken hyperbolic 3-manifold N has at most finitely many irreducible Heegaard splittings.

We give a short proof of Waldhausen's homeomorphism theorem for orientable Haken 3-manifolds.

Colding and Gabai have given an effective version of Li's theorem that non-Haken hyperbolic 3-manifolds have finitely many irreducible Heegaard splittings. As a corollary of their work, we show that Haken hyperbolic 3-manifolds have a finite collection of strongly irreducible Heegaard surfaces $S_i$ and incompressible …

A new proof shows a reducing sphere can be obtained from a given sphere without surgeries.

Revises a theorem by Thurston, finding a counter-example and a weaker version.

Cobordism of Haken $n$-manifolds is defined by a Haken $(n+1)$-manifold $W$ whose boundary has two components, each of which is a closed Haken $n$-manifold. In addition, the inclusion map of the fundamental group of each boundary component to $π_1(W)$ is injective. In this paper we prove that there are 4-dimensional Ha…

A 3-manifold is Haken if it contains a topologically essential surface. The Virtual Haken Conjecture says that every irreducible 3-manifold with infinite fundamental group has a finite cover which is Haken. Here, we discuss two interrelated topics concerning this conjecture. First, we describe computer experiments whic…

Algorithm determines spatial graph isomorphism with vertex, edge colorings and orientations.

New proof for complex 3D shapes.

In the context of Thurstons geometrisation program we address the question which compact aspherical 3-manifolds admit Riemannian metrics of nonpositive curvature. We show that non-geometric Haken manifolds generically, but not always, admit such metrics. More precisely, we prove that a Haken manifold with, possibly emp…

Haken n-manifolds have been defined and studied by B. Foozwell and H. Rubinstein in analogy with the classical Haken manifolds of dimension 3, based upon the the theory of boundary patterns developed by K. Johannson. The Euler characteristic of a Haken manifold is analyzed and shown to be equal to the sum of the Charne…

This paper adresses the following problem: Given a closed orientable three-manifold M, are there at most finitely many closed orientable three-manifolds 1-dominated by M? We solve this question for the class of closed orientable graph manifolds. More presisely the main result of this paper asserts that any closed orien…

New method shows how to move one Heegaard surface positioning to another.

We use Heegaard splittings to give some examples of virtually Haken 3-manifolds.

The study examines conditions for Haken 3-manifolds and their fundamental groups.

This is a "software upgrade" to a paper originally published in 1976, with cleaner statements and improved proofs. The main result is that, in a Haken 3-manifold, the space of all incompressible surfaces in a single isotopy class is contractible, except when the surface is the fiber of a surface bundle structure, in wh…

A famous example of Casson and Gordon shows that a Haken 3-manifold can have an infinite family of irreducible Heegaard splittings with different genera. In this paper, we prove that a closed non-Haken 3-manifold has only finitely many irreducible Heegaard splittings, up to isotopy. This is much stronger than the Waldh…

Wise's Quasiconvex Hierarchy Theorem classifying hyperbolic virtually compact special groups in terms of quasiconvex hierarchies played an essential role in Agol's proof of the Virtual Haken Conjecture. Answering a question of Wise, we construct a new virtual quasiconvex hierarchy for relatively hyperbolic virtually co…

Haken n-manifolds are aspherical manifolds, defined and studied by B. Foozwell and H. Rubinstein, that can be successively cut open along essential codimension-one submanifolds until a disjoint union of n-cells is obtained. Such manifolds come equipped with a boundary pattern, a particular kind of decomposition of the …

For every closed hyperbolic Haken 3-manifold and, more generally, for any hyperbolic 3-manifold M which is homeomorphic to the interior of a Haken manifold, the number 0.286 is a Margulis number. If M has non-zero first Betti number, or if M is closed and contains a semi-fiber, then 0.292 is a Margulis number for M.

Suppose that M is a fibered three-manifold whose fiber is a surface of positive genus with one boundary component. Assume that M is not a semi-bundle. We show that infinitely many fillings of M along dM are virtually Haken. It follows that infinitely many Dehn-surgeries of any non-trivial knot in the three-sphere are v…

We show that in any triangulated 3-manifold, every index n topologically minimal surface can be transformed to a surface which has local indices (as computed in each tetrahedron) that sum to at most n. This generalizes classical theorems of Kneser and Haken, and more recent theorems of Rubinstein and Stocking, and is t…

Thurston's hyperbolization theorem for Haken manifolds and normal surface theory yield an algorithm to determine whether or not a compact orientable 3-manifold with nonempty boundary consisting of tori admits a complete finite-volume hyperbolic metric on its interior. A conjecture of Gabai, Meyerhoff, and Milley reduce…

We show that if M is a surface bundle over S^1 with fiber of genus 2, then for any integer n, M has a finite cover tilde(M) with b_1(tilde(M)) > n. A corollary is that M can be geometrized using only the `non-fiber' case of Thurston's Geometrization Theorem for Haken manifolds.

We examine three key conjectures in 3-manifold theory: the virtually Haken conjecture, the positive virtual b_1 conjecture and the virtually fibred conjecture. We explore the interaction of these conjectures with the following seemingly unrelated areas: eigenvalues of the Laplacian, and Heegaard splittings. We first gi…

A 3-manifold is Haken if it contains a topologically essential surface. The Virtual Haken Conjecture posits that every irreducible 3-manifold with infinite fundamental group has a finite cover which is Haken. In this paper, we study random 3-manifolds and their finite covers in an attempt to shed light on this difficul…

A combinatorial condition is obtained for when immersed or embedded incompressible surfaces in compact 3-manifolds with tori boundary components remain incompressible after Dehn surgery. A combinatorial characterisation of hierarchies is described. A new proof is given of the topological rigidity theorem of Hass and Sc…

This paper has been withdrawn by the author, as the proof of Theorem 3.2 contains a flaw; subsequently, both it and Theorem 3.3 are not known to hold. The content of Section 5 has been improved and expanded upon in two separate papers. The structural properties in 5.1 and 5.2 appear in arXiv:1101.2603; the classificati…

We show that there exist infinitely many commensurability classes of finite volume hyperbolic 3-manifolds whose fundamental group contains a subgroup which is locally free but not free. The main technical tool is the fact that a collection of hyperbolic 3-manifolds of bounded volume contains infinitely many commensurab…

We give a brief summary of some of our work and our joint work with Stephan Tillmann on solving Thurston's equation and Haken equation on triangulated 3-manifolds in this paper. Several conjectures on the existence of solutions to Thurston's equation and Haken equation are made. Resolutions of these conjecture will lea…

We prove that cubulated hyperbolic groups are virtually special. The proof relies on results of Haglund and Wise which also imply that they are linear groups, and quasi-convex subgroups are separable. A consequence is that closed hyperbolic 3-manifolds have finite-sheeted Haken covers, which resolves the virtual Haken …

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 Casson invariant. Along the way we give simpler and shorter proofs of the existence…

We introduce the notion of a `canonical' splitting over Z or ZxZ for a finitely generated group G. We show that when G happens to be the fundamental group of an orientable Haken manifold M with incompressible boundary, then the decomposition of the group naturally obtained from canonical splittings is closely related t…

In this paper, we give infinitely many non-Haken hyperbolic genus three 3-manifolds each of which has a finite cover whose induced Heegaard surface from some genus three Heegaard surface of the base manifold is reducible but can be compressed into an incompressible surface. This result supplements [CG] and extends [MMZ…

In this paper, we find lower bounds for volumes of hyperbolic 3-manifolds with various topological conditions. Let V_3 = 1.01494 denote the volume of a regular ideal simplex in hyperbolic 3-space. As a special case of the main theorem, if a hyperbolic manifold M contains an acylindrical surface S, then Vol(M)>= -2 V_3 …

The famous Haken-Kneser-Milnor theorem states that every 3-manifold can be expressed in a unique way as a connected sum of prime 3-manifolds. The analogous statement for 3-orbifolds has been part of the folklore for several years, and it was commonly believed that slight variations on the argument used for manifolds wo…

Kneser-Haken Finiteness asserts that for each compact 3-manifold M there is an integer c(M) such that any collection of k>c(M) closed, essential, 2-sided surfaces in M must contain parallel elements. We show here that if M is closed then twice the number of tetrahedra in a (pseudo)-triangulation of M suffices for c(M).

This paper is an introduction to the subject of virtual knot theory, combined with a discussion of some specific new theorems about virtual knots. The new results are as follows: We prove, using a 3-dimensional topology approach that if a connected sum of two virtual knots $K_{1}$ and $K_{2}$ is trivial, then so are bo…

In this paper we settle Thurston's old question of whether the Weber-Seifert dodecahedral space is non-Haken, a problem that has been a benchmark for progress in computational 3-manifold topology over recent decades. We resolve this question by combining recent significant advances in normal surface enumeration, new he…

We address a conjecture that $π_1$-surjective maps between closed aspherical 3-manifolds having the same rank on $π_1$ must be of non-zero degree. The conjecture is proved for Seifert manifolds, which is used in constructing the first known example of minimum Haken manifold. Another motivation is to study epimorphisms …

In 1970, E. M. Andreev published a classification of all three-dimensional compact hyperbolic polyhedra having non-obtuse dihedral angles. Given a combinatorial description of a polyhedron, $C$, Andreev's Theorem provides five classes of linear inequalities, depending on $C$, for the dihedral angles, which are necessar…

This paper gives a proof that the universal cover of a closed 3-manifold built from three $π_1$-injective handlebodies is homeomorphic to $\mathbb R^3$. This construction is an extension to handlebodies of the conditions for gluing of three solid tori to produce non-Haken Seifert fibered manifolds with infinite fundame…