Incompressible Surfaces via Branched Surfaces

Series
Geometry Topology Working Seminar
Time
Friday, April 23, 2010 - 2:00pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 269
Speaker
Thao Vuong – Georgia Tech
Organizer
Meredith Casey
We will give definitions and then review a result by Floyd and Oertel that in a Haken 3-manifold M, there are a finite number of branched surfaces whose fibered neighborhoods contain all the incompressible, boundary-incompressible surfaces in M, up to isotopy. A corollary of this is that the set of boundary slopes of a knot K in S^3 is finite.