arXiv research

Geometrization Theorem solves complex geometry problems.

We recreate an unpublished proof of William Thurston from the early 1970's that any smooth 2-plane field on a manifold of dimension at least 4 is homotopic to the tangent plane field of a foliation.

We give a general overview of the influence of William Thurston on the French mathematical school and we show how some of the major problems he solved are rooted in the French mathematical tradition. At the same time, we survey some of Thurston's major results and their impact. The final version of this paper will appe…

We give examples of closed orientable graph 3-manifolds with fundamental group which is not a subgroup of GL(4,k) for any field k. This answers a question in the Kirby problem list from 1977 which is credited to the late William Thurston.

In 1986 William P. Thurston introduced the celebrated (asymmetric) Lipschitz distance on the Teichmueller space of a (closed or punctured) surface. In this paper we extend his work to the Teichmueller space of a surface with boundary endowed the arc distance. In this new setting we construct a large family of geodesics…

These are course notes I wrote for my Fall 2013 graduate topics course on geometric structures, taught at ICERM. The notes rework many of proofs in William P. Thurston's beautiful but hard-to-understand paper, "Shapes of Polyhedra". A number of people, both in and out of the class, found these notes very useful and so …

This paper adapts Thurston's earthquake metric to Riemann surfaces with marked points.

The present paper is composed of two parts. In the first one we define two pseudo-metrics $L_F$ and $K_F$ on the Teichmuüller space of semi-translation surfaces $\mathcal{TQ}_g(\underline k,ε)$, which are the symmetric counterparts to the metrics defined by William Thurston on $\mathcal{T}_g^n$. We prove some nice prop…

Extends Thurston's combinatorial characterization to all branched coverings of the 2-sphere.

I give my view of the early history of the discovery of hyperbolic structures on knot complements from my early work on representations of knot groups into matrix groups to my meeting with William Thurston in 1976. (This article was written by Robert Riley about ten years before his death in 2000 and never submitted fo…

Characterizes diagrams achieving Morton-Franks-Williams inequality for positive knots and links.

Using alternating Heegaard diagrams, we construct some 3-manifolds which admit diffeomorphisms such that the non-wandering sets of the diffeomorphisms are composed of Smale-Williams solenoid attractors and repellers, an interesting example is the truncated-cube space. In addition, we prove that if the nonwandering set …

This paper classifies expanding attractors and non-transitive Anosov flows on specific knot and manifold spaces.

Galatius and Randal-Williams defined a topology on the set of closed submanifolds of ${\mathbb R}^n$. Bökstedt and Madsen proved that a $C^1$-version of this topology is metrizable by showing that it is regular and second countable. Using that the scanning map of a topological sheaf on manifolds is an embedding, we giv…

We give conditions on a knot on which the Morton-Franks-Williams inequality is not sharp. As applications, we show infinitely many examples of knots where the inequality is not sharp and also prove (by giving examples) that the deficit of the inequality can be arbitrarily large.

Hierarchical clustering uses OWA operators to generalize linkage methods and avoid dendrogram inversions.

We generalize the Morton-Franks-Williams inequality to the colored $\mathfrak{sl}(N)$ link homology defined in arXiv:0907.0695, which gives infinitely many new bounds for the braid index and the self linking number. A key ingredient of our proof is a composition product for the general MOY graph polynomial, which gener…

We study the Morton-Franks-Williams inequality for closures of simple braids (also known as positive permutation braids). This allows to prove, in a simple way, that the set of simple braids is a orthonormal basis for the inner product of the Hecke algebra of the braid group defined by Kálmán, who first obtained this r…

Short note on braid index and quasipositivity of certain pretzel knots.

Given a TQFT in dimension d+1, and an infinite cyclic covering of a closed (d+1)-dimensional manifold M, we define an invariant taking values in a strong shift equivalence class of matrices. The notion of strong shift equivalence originated in R. Williams' work in symbolic dynamics. The Turaev-Viro module associated to…

New minimal link diagrams found, including torus links and homogeneous ones.

We define parametrized cobordism categories and study their formal properties as bivariant theories. Bivariant transformations to a strongly excisive bivariant theory give rise to characteristic classes of smooth bundles with strong additivity properties. In the case of cobordisms between manifolds with boundary, we pr…

Hamiltonian cycles found in toroidal maps.

We find all Heegaard diagrams with the property "alternating" or "weakly alternating" on a genus two orientable closed surface. Using these diagrams we give infinitely many genus two 3--manifolds, each admits an automorphism whose non-wondering set consists of two Williams solenoids, one attractor and one repeller. The…

The integrability of the geodesic flow on the three-folds $\mathcal M^3$ admitting $SL(2,\mathbb R)$-geometry in Thurston's sense is investigated. The main examples are the quotients $\mathcal M^3_Γ=Γ\backslash PSL(2,\mathbb R)$, where $Γ\subset PSL(2,\mathbb R)$ is a cofinite Fuchsian group. We show that the correspon…

We give an overview over the higher torsion invariants of Bismut-Lott, Igusa-Klein and Dwyer-Weiss-Williams, including some more or less recent developments.

This is a chapter that is to appear in the "Handbook of Knot Theory", edited by William W. Menasco and Morwen B. Thistlethwaite.

Computes homotopy groups of diffeomorphism spaces for high-dimensional manifolds.

Semi-Equivelar maps are generalizations of Archimedean solids to the surfaces other than 2-sphere. There are eight semi-equivelar maps of types $\{3^{3},4^{2}\}$, $\{3^{2},4,3,4\}$, $\{6,3,6,3\}$, $\{3^{4},6\}$, $\{4,8^{2}\}$, $\{3,12^{2}\}$, $\{4,6,12\}$, $\{6,4,3,4\}$ exist on the torus. In this article we show the e…

We show that 3-braid links with given (non-zero) Alexander or Jones polynomial are finitely many, and can be effectively determined. We classify among closed 3-braids strongly quasipositive and fibered ones, and show that 3-braid links have a unique incompressible Seifert surface. We also classify the positive braid wo…

The paper establishes a new pseudoisotopy result for embedding spaces, leading to computations of homotopy groups of long knots.

The versified play Henry VIII is nowadays widely recognized to be a collaborative work not written solely by William Shakespeare. We employ combined analysis of vocabulary and versification together with machine learning techniques to determine which authors also took part in the writing of the play and what were their…

Homological stability proved for handlebody mapping class groups.

Survey on Thurston metric on Teichmüller space, focusing on extremal maps.

By explicitly comparing constructions, we prove that the higher torsion invariants of smooth bundles defined by Igusa and Klein via Morse theory agree with the higher torsion invariants defined by Badzioch, Dorabiala, Dwyer, Weiss, and Williams using homotopy theoretical methods.

We give criteria for an invariant of lens space links to bound the maximal self-linking number in certain tight contact lens spaces. As a corollary we extend the Franks-Williams-Morton inequality to the setting of lens spaces.

In this paper we extend Badzioch's, Dorabiala's, and Williams' definition of cohomological higher smooth torsion to a twisted cohomological higher torsion invariant. Additionally, we show that this still satisfies geometric additivity and transfer, and will also satisfy additivity and transfer for coefficients.

Unified proof of Nielsen-Thurston classification via Teichmüller's theorem.

The paper extends Thurston's method to new variants of Mather-Thurston theorem.

Developed theory for Thurston maps with a small set of essential singularities.

The works of William Rowan Hamilton in Geometrical Optics are presented, with emphasis on the Malus-Dupin theorem. According to that theorem, a family of light rays depending on two parameters can be focused to a single point by an optical instrument made of reflecting or refracting surfaces if and only if, before ente…

Article explores Thurston's circle packing theorem in 3-manifold geometry.

We describe the Williams zeta functions and the twist zeta functions of sub-Lorenz templates generated by renormalizable Lorenz maps, in terms of the corresponding zeta-functions of the sub-Lorenz templates generated by the renormalized map and by the map that determines the renormalization type.

Overview of Thurston's work in math.

Raymond and Wiliams in "Examples of p-adic transformation groups", Ann. of Math. (2) 78 (1963) 92-106, constructed an action of the p-adic integers on an n-dimensional compactum, n>1, with the orbit space of dimension n+2. We present a simpler construction of such an example.

We establish basic geometric and topological properties of Thurston's Master Teapot and the Thurston set for superattracting unimodal self-maps of intervals. In particular, the Master Teapot is connected, contains the unit cylinder, and its intersection with a set $\mathbb{D} \times \{c\}$ grows monotonically with $c$.…

Study shows genus two Heegaard diagrams for all Thurston geometries.

Uniformly finite Cannon--Thurston fibers in most hyperbolic settings.