arXiv research

The Epstein-Baer theory of curve isotopies is basic to the remarkable theorem that homotopic homeomorphisms of surfaces are isotopic. The groundbreaking work of R. Baer was carried out on closed, orientable surfaces and extended by D. B. A. Epstein to arbitrary surfaces, compact or not, with or without boundary and ori…

Gluck twists on spheres yield equivalent 4-manifolds under certain conditions.

Finite-type surfaces have a topological Hopf property.

Homotopy equivalences of 3-manifolds have a bounded power.

We show that a homotopy equivalence between compact, connected, oriented surfaces with non-empty boundary is homotopic to a homeomorphism if and only if it commutes with the Goldman bracket.

Goldman bracket distinguishes surface homeomorphisms.

Let M be a closed simply connected n-manifold of positive sectional curvature. We determine its homeomorphism or homotopic type if M also admits an isometric elementary p-group action of large rank. Our main results are: There exists a constant p(n)>0 such that (1) If M^{2n} admits an effective isometric \Bbb Z_p^k-act…

The paper defines and analyzes homotopic rotation sets for surfaces of higher genus.

This paper introduces a rigorous computer-assisted procedure for analyzing hyperbolic 3-manifolds. This technique is used to complete the proof of several long-standing rigidity conjectures in 3-manifold theory as well as to provide a new lower bound for the volume of a closed orientable hyperbolic 3-manifold. We prove…

Suppose M is a noncompact connected PL 2-manifold and let H(M)_0 denote the identity component of the homeomorphism group of M with the compact-open topology. In this paper we classify the homotopy type of H(M)_0 by showing that {\cal H}(M)_0 has the homotopy type of the circle if M is the plane, an open or half open a…

Strong rigidity proven for non-compact surfaces.

The study examines the realizability of a 4-manifold invariant for homeomorphisms.

Kirby proved that two framed links in S^3 give orientation-preserving homeomorphic results of surgery if and only if these two links are related by a sequence of two kinds of moves called stabilizations and handle-slides. Fenn and Rourke gave a necessary and sufficient condition for two framed links in a closed, orient…

Study on stable translation lengths of surface homeomorphisms and their approximations.

We prove that every topological conjugation between two germs of singular holomorphic curves in the complex plane is homotopic to another conjugation which extends homeomorphically to the exceptional divisors of their minimal desingularizations. As an application we give an explicit presentation of a finite index subgr…

In this paper we define, for each aspherical orientable 3-manifold $M$ endowed with a \emph{torus splitting} $Ţ$, a 2-dimensional fundamental $l_1$-class $[M]^{Ţ}$ whose $l_1$-norm has similar properties as the Gromov simplicial volume of $M$ (additivity under torus splittings and isometry under finite covering maps). …

Let Z be an Alexandrov space with curvature bounded below by -1 such that Z is homotopy equivalent to a real hyperbolic manifold M. It is known that the volume of Z is not smaller than the volume of M. If the volumes are equal, this short paper proves that the homotopy equivalence is homotopic to an isometric homeomorp…

A natural problem in the theory of 3-manifolds is the question of whether two 3-manifolds are homeomorphic or not. The aim of this paper is to study this problem for the class of closed Haken manifolds using degree one maps. To this purpose we introduce an invariant $τ(N)=({\rm Vol}(N),\|N\|)$ where $\|N\|$ denotes th…

We show that, for any two orientable smooth open 4-manifolds $X_0,X_1$ which are homeomorphic, their cotangent bundles $T^*X_0,T^*X_1$ are symplectomorphic with their canonical symplectic structure. In particular, for any smooth manifold $R$ homeomorphic to $\mathbb{R}^4$, the standard Stein structure on $T^*R$ is Stei…

We prove a basic inequality for the d-invariants of a splice of knots in homology spheres. As a result, we are able to prove a new relation on the rank of reduced Floer homology under maps between Seifert fibered homology spheres, improving results of the first and second authors. As a corollary, a degree one map betwe…

For an oriented manifold $M$ whose dimension is less than $4$, we use the contractibility of certain complexes associated to its submanifolds to cut $M$ into simpler pieces in order to do local to global arguments. In particular, in these dimensions, we give a different proof of a deep theorem of Thurston in foliation …

Classifies 4-manifolds with elementary amenable groups and their boundaries.

The Nielsen Conjecture for Homeomorphisms asserts that any homeomorphism $f$ of a closed manifold is isotopic to a map realizing the Nielsen number of $f$, which is a lower bound for the number of fixed points among all maps homotopic to $f$. The main theorem of this paper proves this conjecture for all orientation pre…

Let $h:X \to Y$ be a homeomorphism between hyperbolic surfaces with finite topology. If $h$ is homotopic to a holomorphic map, then every closed geodesic in $X$ is at least as long as the corresponding geodesic in $Y$, by the Schwarz Lemma. The converse holds trivially when $X$ and $Y$ are disks or annuli, and it holds…

A classical result of Sampson and Schoen-Yau in 1978 states that every diffeomorphism between compact hyperbolic Riemann surfaces is homotopic to an harmonic diffeomorphism. As conjectured by Schoen in 1993 and partially proved by Wan in 1992 and Tam-Wan in 1995, we prove in this article that this theorem generalizes t…

We prove that, if M is a compact oriented manifold of dimension 4k+3, where k>0, such that pi_1(M) is not torsion-free, then there are infinitely many manifolds that are homotopic equivalent to M but not homeomorphic to it. To show the infinite size of the structure set of M, we construct a secondary invariant tau_(2):…

We prove that a circle bundle over a closed oriented aspherical manifold with hyperbolic fundamental group admits a self-map of absolute degree greater than one if and only if it is virtually trivial. This generalizes in every dimension the case of circle bundles over hyperbolic surfaces, for which the result was known…

We show that there are homotopy equivalences $h:N\to M$ between closed manifolds which are induced by cell-like maps $p:N\to X$ and $q:M\to X$ but which are not homotopic to homeomorphisms. The phenomenon is based on construction of cell-like maps that kill certain $\mathbb L$-classes. The image space in these construc…

Given a proper map f : M $\rightarrow$ Q, having cell-like point-inverses, from a manifold-without-boundary M onto an ANR Q, it is a much-studied problem to find when f is approximable by homeomorphisms, i.e., when the decomposition of M induced by f is shrinkable (in the sense of Bing). If dimension M $\geq$ 5, J. W. …

Let $f\colon M\to N$ be a proper map between two aspherical compact orientable 3-manifolds with empty or toroidal boundary. We assume that $N$ is not a closed graph-manifold. Suppose that $f$ induces an epimorphism on fundamental groups. We show that $f$ is homotopic to a homeomorphism if one of the following holds: ei…

We study noncompact, complete, finite volume, Riemannian 4-manifolds $M$ with sectional curvature $-1<K<0$. We prove that $π_1 M$ cannot be a 3-manifold group. A classical theorem of Gromov says that $M$ is homeomorphic to the interior of a compact manifold $\M$ with boundary $\partial\barM$. We show that for each $π_1…

We use the reflection group trick to glue manifolds with corners that are Borel-Serre compactifications of locally symmetric spaces of noncompact type and obtain aspherical manifolds. We call these \emph{piecewise locally symmetric} manifolds. This class of spaces provide new examples of aspherical manifolds whose fund…

In the first part of this paper, we let $G$ be a finitely-generated amenable group such that $G/[G, G]$ is torsion-free. We suppose that $G$ acts by homeomorphisms homotopic to the identity on a manifold $M$, and give conditions on $M$ which imply that such an action must lift to an action on the universal cover $\tild…

Let $f\colon M\to N$ be a continuous map between closed irreducible graph manifolds with infinite fundamental group. Perron and Shalen showed that if $f$ induces a homology equivalence on all finite covers, then $f$ is in fact homotopic to a homeomorphism. Their proof used the statement that every graph manifold is fin…

The aim of this paper is to introduce the concepts of homotopical smallness and closeness. These are the properties of homotopical classes of maps that are related to recent developments in homotopy theory and to the construction of universal covering spaces for non-semilocally simply connected spaces, in particular to…

We compute the topological simple structure set of closed manifolds which occur as total spaces of flat bundles over lens spaces S^l/(Z/p) with fiber an n-dimensjional torus T^n for an odd prime p and l greater or equal to 3, provided that the induced Z/p-action on pi_1(T^n) = Z^n is free outside the origin. To the bes…

This paper classifies embedded, codimension-one spheres which are null homotopic. This information is used to show that all null homotopic, immersed codimension-one spheres which are taut in the sense of Terng and Thorbergsson are actually distance spheres.

For a given $ε>0$, we show that there exist two finite index subgroups of $PSL_2(\mathbb{Z})$ which are $(1+ε)$-quasisymmetrically conjugated and the conjugation homeomorphism is not conformal. This implies that for any $ε>0$ there are two finite regular covers of the Modular once punctured torus $T_0$ (or just the Mod…

Let $M=H_1\cup_S H_2$ be a Heegaard splitting of a closed orientable 3-manifold $M$ (or a bridge decomposition of a link exterior). Consider the subgroup $\mathrm{MCG}^0(H_j)$ of the mapping class group of $H_j$ consisting of mapping classes represented by auto-homeomorphisms of $H_j$ homotopic to the identity, and let…

Null-homotopic knots in certain 3-manifolds are uniquely identified by their complements.

Complex surfaces show non-simply connected diffeomorphism groups with non-homotopic loops.

We survey some properties of homotopical and homological $Z_n$-sets in topological spaces.

Two virtual link diagrams are homotopic if one may be transformed into the other by a sequence of virtual Reidemeister moves, classical Reidemeister moves, and self crossing changes. We recall the pure virtual braid group. We then describe the set of pure virtual braids that are homotopic to the identity braid.

We classify homotopes of classical symmetric spaces (studied in Part I of this work). Our classification uses the fibered structure of homotopes: they are fibered as symmetric spaces, with flat fibers, over a non-degenerate base; the base spaces correspond to inner ideals in Jordan pairs. Using that inner ideals in cla…

It is known that shape injectivity implies homotopical Hausdorff and that the converse does not hold, even if the space is required to be a Peano continuum. This paper gives an alternative definition of homotopical Hausdorff inspired by a new topology on the set of fixed endpoint homotopy classes of paths. This version…

We modify the definition of the Khovanov complex for oriented links in a thickening of an oriented surface to obtain a triply graded homological link invariant with a new homotopical grading.

Study of endperiodic maps on infinite graphs, proving homotopy and eigenvalue properties.

In this paper we first show that the necessary condition introduced in our previous paper is also a sufficient condition for a path to be a geodesic in the group $\Ham^c(M)$ of compactly supported Hamiltonian symplectomorphisms. This applies with no restriction on $M$. We then discuss conditions which guarantee that su…