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Geometry-Topology Seminar

Thursday, March 31, 2016 - 4:30pm

Abigail Thompson

UC Davis and IAS

Location

University of Pennsylvania

DRL 4C8

This is the first of two talks.

Let M be a closed orientable 3-manifold. A Heegaard surface F splits M into two handlebodies. If M is a reducible 3-manifold, Haken showed that one can find a reducing sphere intersecting F in a single simple closed curve. What if M is irreducible but toroidal? In general the intersection of an essential torus with F can be quite complicated, so it can be difficult to determine from a Heegaard splitting whether or not M contains an essential torus. We provide some conditions under which this determination can be made.