Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Gabai has a nice criteria for recognizing fibered knots in 3-manifolds. This criteria is best described in terms of sutured manifolds and simple sutured hierarchies. We will introduce this terminology and prove Gabai's result. Given time (or in subsequent talks) we might discuss generalizations concerning constructing foliations on knot compliments and 3-manifolds in general. Such results are very useful in understanding the minimal genus representatives of homology classes in the manifold (in particular, the minimal genus of a Seifert surface for a knot).