Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Surface bundles and Lefschetz fibrations over surfaces constitute a rich source of examples of smooth, symplectic, and complex manifolds. Their sections and multisections carry interesting information on the smooth structure of the underlying four-manifold. In this talk we will discuss several problems and results on surface bundles, Lefschetz fibrations, and their (multi)sections, which we will tackle, for the most part, using various mapping class groups of surfaces. Conversely, we will use geometric arguments to obtain some structural results for mapping class groups.