No Arabic abstract
The fundamental group of the Menger universal curve is uncountable and not free, although all of its finitely generated subgroups are free. It contains an isomorphic copy of the fundamental group of every one-dimensional separable metric space and an isomorphic copy of the fundamental group of every planar Peano continuum. We give an explicit and systematic combinatorial description of the fundamental group of the Menger universal curve and its generalized Cayley graph in terms of word sequences. The word calculus, which requires only two letters and their inverses, is based on Pasynkovs partial topological product representation and can be expressed in terms of a variation on the classical puzzle known as the Towers of Hanoi.
We bound the value of the Casson invariant of any integral homology 3-sphere $M$ by a constant times the distance-squared to the identity, measured in any word metric on the Torelli group $T$, of the element of $T$ associated to any Heegaard splitting of $M$. We construct examples which show this bound is asymptotically sharp.
By the work of Harer, the reduced homology of the complex of curves is a fundamental cohomological object associated to all torsion free finite index subgroups of the mapping class group. We call this homology group the Steinberg module of the mapping class group. It was previously known that the curve complex has the homotopy type of a bouquet of spheres. Here, we give the first explicit homologically nontrivial sphere in the curve complex and show that under the action of the mapping class group, the orbit of this homology class generates the reduced homology of the curve complex.
It has been known for a long time that the fundamental group of the quotient of $RR ^3$ by the Case-Chamberlin continuum is nontrivial. In the present paper we prove that this group is in fact, uncountable.
We show that the homotopy type of a finite oriented Poincar{e} 4-complex is determined by its quadratic 2-type provided its fundamental group is finite and has a dihedral Sylow 2-subgroup. By combining with results of Hambleton-Kreck and Bauer, this applies in the case of smooth oriented 4-manifolds whose fundamental group is a finite subgroup of SO(3). An important class of examples are elliptic surfaces with finite fundamental group.
Given a natural number k and an orientable surface S of finite type, define the k-curve graph to be the graph with vertices corresponding to isotopy classes of essential simple closed curves on S and with edges corresponding to pairs of such curves admitting representatives that intersect at most k times. We prove that the automorphism group of the k-curve graph of a surface S is isomorphic to the extended mapping class group for all k sufficiently small with respect to the Euler characteristic of S. We prove the same result for the so-called systolic complex, a variant of the curve graph whose complete subgraphs encode the intersection patterns for any collection of systoles with respect to a hyperbolic metric. This resolves a conjecture of Schmutz Schaller.