Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

The fundamental groups of knot complements have lots of finite quotients. We give a criterion for a hyperbolic knot in the three-sphere to be distinguished (up to isotopy and mirroring) from every other knot in the three-sphere by the set of finite quotients of its fundamental group, and we use this criterion as well as recent work of Baldwin-Sivek to show that there are infinitely many hyperbolic knots distinguished (up to isotopy and mirroring) by finite quotients. 

The braid group (which encodes the braiding of n strands) has a canonical projection to the symmetric group (recording where the ends of the strands go). We ask the question: what are the extensions of the symmetric group by abelian groups that arise as quotients of the braid group, by a refinement of this canonical projection? To answer this question, we study a particular twisted coefficient system for the symmetric group, called the integral pair module. In this module, we find the maximal submodule in each commensurability class.

In the 20th century, Thurston proved two classification theorems, one for surface homeomorphisms and one for branched covers of surfaces.  While the theorems have long been understood to be analogous, we will present new work with Belk and Winarski showing that the two theorems are in fact special cases of one Ubertheorem.  We will also discuss joint work with Belk, Lanier, Strenner, Taylor, Winarski, and Yurttas on algorithmic aspects of Thurston’s theorem.  This talk is meant to be accessible to a wide audience.

This talk will have two parts.  The first half will describe how to construct symplectic structures on trisected 4-manifolds. This construction is inspired by projective complex geometry and completely characterizes symplectic 4-manifolds among all smooth 4-manifolds.  The second half will address a curious phenomenon: symplectic 4-manifolds appear to not admit any interesting connected sum decompositions.  One potential explanation is that every embedded 3-sphere can be made contact-type.

A link of an isolated complex surface singularity is the intersection of the surface with a small sphere centered at the singular point. The link is a smooth 3-manifold that carries a natural contact structure (given by complex tangencies); one might then want to study its symplectic or Stein fillings. A special family of Stein fillings, called Milnor fillings, can be obtained by smoothing the singular point of the original complex surface.

In the Instanton and Heegaard Floer theories, a nearly fibered knot is one for which the top grading has rank 2. Sivek-Baldwin and Li-Ye showed that the guts (ie. the reduced sutured manifold complement) of a minimal genus Seifert surface of a nearly fibered knot has of one of three simple types.We show that nearly fibered knots with guts of two of these types have handle number 2 while those with guts of the third type have handle number 4.