arXiv research

Nonpositive towers property in 3-manifolds spines.

A flow-spine of a 3-manifold is a spine admitting a flow that is transverse to the spine, where the flow in the complement of the spine is diffeomorphic to a constant flow in an open ball. We say that a contact structure on a closed, connected, oriented 3-manifold is supported by a flow-spine if it has a contact form w…

In this paper we raise the question whether every closed Riemannian manifold has a spine of minimal area, and we answer it affirmatively in the surface case. On constant curvature surfaces we introduce the spine systole, a continuous real function on moduli space that measures the minimal length of a spine in each surf…

Unique simple spines of homotopy 2-spheres are shown to be ambiently isotopic.

We show that infinitely many of the simply connected 4-manifolds constructed by Levine and Lidman that do not admit PL spines actually admit topological spines.

Corrects a 1-off error in Harer's spine dimension calculation for decorated Teichmüller spaces.

Constructs Teichmüller curve to study Thurston spine structure.

This paper proves a map from flow-spines to contact structures is surjective.

The Thurston spine's properties are studied in relation to Morse-Smale complexes.

In this article we establish the relation between the spines of 3-manifolds and the polyhedra with identified faces. We do this by showing that the spines of the closed, connected, orientable 3-manifolds can be presented through polyhedra with identified faces in a very natural way. We also prove the equivalence betwee…

A special spine of a three-manifold is said to be poor if it does not contain proper simple subpolyhedra. Using the Turaev-Viro invariants, we establish that every compact three-dimensional manifold M with connected nonempty boundary has a finite number of poor special spines. Moreover, all poor special spines of the m…

The abstract extends Reidemeister theorem to 3-manifolds using diagrams of links and bands.

New geometric spine for Artin groups defined by cube complexes.

Paper shows mapping class group-equivariant Teichmüller space deformation to Thurston spine.

Thurston's spine dimension exceeds virtual cohomological dimension.

A spine is constructed for a non-orientable surface's decorated Teichmüller space.

New 3-manifold spines with unique Whitehead graphs identified.

The paper shows conditions under which certain 4-manifolds have no smooth spines.

Theory of link projections to 3-manifold spines, proving combinatorial moves for isotopic links.

Any bounding compact smooth manifold bounds a compact manifold with a spine consisting of transversely intersecting codimension one submanifolds. This paper provides details for a picture proof given in previous papers with S. Akbulut.

Simplified combinatorial descriptions of branched spines for 3-manifolds using primary MP move and sliding moves.

We show that all PL manifolds of dimension $\geq 3$ have spines similar to Bing's house with two rooms. Beyond this we explore approximation rigidity and an $h$-principle.

Outer space and Teichmüller space fail well-rounded retract analogy.

Geometrical spines are defined for 3-manifolds with natural metrics, in particular, for lens manifolds. We show that any spine of L(p,q) close enough to its geometrical spine (i.e., to the cut locus with respect to the standard metric) contains at least E(p,q)-3 vertices, which is exactly the conjectured value for Matv…

$2$-stratifolds are a generalization of $2$-manifolds in that there are disjoint simple closed branch curves. We obtain a list of all closed $3$-manifolds that have a $2$-stratifold as a spine.

New proof confirms surfaces can be divided into polygons.

We establish a calculus for branched spines of 3-manifolds by means of branched Matveev-Piergallini moves and branched bubble-moves. We briefly indicate some of its possible applications in the study and definition of State-Sum Quantum Invariants.

Continuum-wise hyperbolicity is exactly the pseudo-Anosov dynamics with spine singularities.

We introduce and analyze the characteristic foliation induced by a contact structure on a branched surface, in particular a branched standard spine of a 3-manifold. We extend to (fairly general) singular foliations of branched surfaces the local existence and uniqueness results which hold for genuine surfaces. Moreover…

The paper studies curves in surfaces using flow-spines and apparent contours.

New contractible complex shows virtual cohomological dimension of RAAGs.

For a 3-dimensional manifold $M^3$, its complexity $c(M^3)$, introduced by S.Matveev, is the minimal number of vertices of an almost simple spine of $M^3$; in many cases it is equal to the minimal number of tetrahedra in a singular triangulation of $M^3$. An approach to estimating $c(M^3)$ from below for total spaces o…

We show that under reasonable conditions, the spines of the handlebodies of a strongly irreducible Heegaard splitting will intersect a closed ball in a graph which is isotopic into the boundary of the ball. This is in some sense a generalization of the results by Scharlemann on how a strongly irreducible Heegaard split…

We construct infinitely many smooth 4-manifolds which are homotopy equivalent to $S^2$ but do not admit a spine, i.e., a piecewise-linear embedding of $S^2$ which realizes the homotopy equivalence. This is the remaining case in the existence problem for codimension-2 spines in simply-connected manifolds. The obstructio…

We introduce a novel approach for predicting the progression of adolescent idiopathic scoliosis from 3D spine models reconstructed from biplanar X-ray images. Recent progress in machine learning have allowed to improve classification and prognosis rates, but lack a probabilistic framework to measure uncertainty in the …

Study on symmetric automorphisms of RAAGs, proving finiteness properties and contractibility.

We prove that for any contact 3-manifold supported by a spinal open book decomposition with planar pages, there is a universal bound on the Euler characteristic and signature of its minimal symplectic fillings. The proof is an application of the spine removal surgery operation recently introduced in joint work of the a…

A canal surface is the envelope of a moving sphere with varying radius, defined by the trajectory C(t) (spine curve) of its center and a radius function r(t). In this paper, we investigate when parameter curves of the canal surface are also lines of curvature. Last of all, for special spine curves we obtain the radius …

Let T_n be the Teichmueller space of flat metrics on the n-dimensional torus and identify SL(n,Z) with the corresponding mapping class group. We prove that the subset Y consisting of those points at which the systoles generate the fundamental group of the torus is, for n > 4, not contractible. In particular, Y is not a…

We give upper bounds of the Matveev complexities of two-bridge link complements by constructing their spines explicitly. In particular, we determine the complexities for an infinite sequence of two-bridge links corresponding to the continued fractions of the form [2,1,...,1,2]. We also give upper bounds for the 3-manif…

Study of Penner's cocycle on fatgraph complex.

This paper concerns thin presentations of knots K in closed 3-manifolds M^3 which produce S^3 by Dehn surgery, for some slope gamma. If M does not have a lens space as a connected summand, we first prove that all such thin presentations, with respect to any spine of M have only local maxima. If M is a lens space and K …

We generalize Conway's approach to integral binary quadratic forms on Q to study integral binary hermitian forms on quadratic imaginary extensions of Q. In Conway's case, an indefinite form that doesn't represent 0 determines a line ("river") in the spine T associated with SL(2,Z) in the hyperbolic plane. In our genera…

The spine of a trisected 4-manifold is a singular 3-dimensional set from which the trisection itself can be reconstructed. 3-manifolds embedded in the trisected 4--manifold can often be isotoped to lie almost or entirely in the spine of the trisection. We define this notion and show that in fact every 3-manifold can be…

We introduce an invariant for trivalent fatgraph spines of a once bordered surface, which takes values in the first homology of the surface. This invariant is the secondary object coming from two 1-cocycles on the dual fatgraph complex, one introduced by Morita and Penner in 2008, and the other by Penner, Turaev, and t…

We prove that the well-rounded retract of SO_n\SL_n(R) is a minimal SL_n(Z)-invariant spine.

A celebrated result concerning triangulations of a given closed 3-manifold is that any two triangulations with the same number of vertices are connected by a sequence of so-called 2-3 and 3-2 moves. A similar result is known for ideal triangulations of topologically finite non-compact 3-manifolds. These results build o…

Knotted trivalent graphs (KTGs) form a rich algebra with a few simple operations: connected sum, unzip, and bubbling. With these operations, KTGs are generated by the unknotted tetrahedron and Moebius strips. Many previously known representations of knots, including knot diagrams and non-associative tangles, can be tur…