No Arabic abstract
Two triples of triangles having pairwise disjoint outlines in 3-space are called combinatorially isotopic if one triple can be obtained from the other by a continuous motion during which the outlines of the triangles remain pairwise disjoint. We conjecture that it can be algorithmically checked if an (ordered or unordered) triple of triangles is combinatorially isotopic to a triple of triangles having pairwise disjoint convex hulls. We also conjecture that any unordered triple of pairwise disjoint triangles in 3-space belongs to one of the 5 types of such triples listed in the paper. We present an elementary proof that triples of different types are not combinatorially isotopic.
We provide three 3-dimensional characterizations of the Z-slice genus of a knot, the minimum genus of a locally-flat surface in 4-space cobounding the knot whose complement has cyclic fundamental group: in terms of balanced algebraic unknotting, in terms of Seifert surfaces, and in terms of presentation matrices of the Blanchfield pairing. This result generalizes to a knot in an integer homology 3-sphere and surfaces in certain simply connected signature zero 4-manifolds cobounding this homology sphere. Using the Blanchfield characterization, we obtain effective lower bounds for the Z-slice genus from the linking pairing of the double branched cover of the knot. In contrast, we show that for odd primes p, the linking pairing on the first homology of the p-fold branched cover is determined up to isometry by the action of the deck transformation group on said first homology.
A low-dimensional version of our main result is the following `converse of the Conway-Gordon-Sachs Theorem on intrinsic linking of the graph $K_6$ in 3-space: For any integer $z$ there are 6 points $1,2,3,4,5,6$ in 3-space, of which every two $i,j$ are joint by a polygonal line $ij$, the interior of one polygonal line is disjoint with any other polygonal line, the linking coefficient of any pair disjoint 3-cycles except for ${123,456}$ is zero, and for the exceptional pair ${123,456}$ is $2z+1$. We prove a higher-dimensional analogue, which is a `converse of a lemma by Segal-Spie.z.
Surgery triangles are an important computational tool in Floer homology. Given a connected oriented surface $Sigma$, we consider the abelian group $K(Sigma)$ generated by bordered 3-manifolds with boundary $Sigma$, modulo the relation that the three manifolds involved in any surgery triangle sum to zero. We show that $K(Sigma)$ is a finitely generated free abelian group and compute its rank. We also construct an explicit basis and show that it generates all bordered 3-manifolds in a certain stronger sense. Our basis is strictly contained in another finite generating set which was constructed previously by Baldwin and Bloom. As a byproduct we confirm a conjecture of Blokhuis and Brouwer on spanning sets for the binary symplectic dual polar space.
We investigate the complexity of finding an embedded non-orientable surface of Euler genus $g$ in a triangulated $3$-manifold. This problem occurs both as a natural question in low-dimensional topology, and as a first non-trivial instance of embeddability of complexes into $3$-manifolds. We prove that the problem is NP-hard, thus adding to the relatively few hardness results that are currently known in 3-manifold topology. In addition, we show that the problem lies in NP when the Euler genus g is odd, and we give an explicit algorithm in this case.
A key result in computational 3-manifold topology is that any two triangulations of the same 3-manifold are connected by a finite sequence of bistellar flips, also known as Pachner moves. One limitation of this result is that little is known about the structure of this sequences; knowing more about the structure could help both proofs and algorithms. Motivated by this, we show that there must be a sequence that satisfies a rigid property that we call semi-monotonicity. We also study this result empirically: we implement an algorithm to find such semi-monotonic sequences, and compare their characteristics to less structured sequences, in order to better understand the practical and theoretical utility of this result.