Groups as automorphisms of dessins denfants

It is known that every finite group can be represented as the full group of automorphisms of a suitable compact dessin denfant. In this paper, we give a constructive and easy proof that the same holds for any countable group by considering non-compact dessins. Moreover, we show that any tame action of a countable group is so realizable.

A K-contact simply connected 5-manifold with no semi-regular Sasakian structure

We construct the first example of a 5-dimensional simply connected compact manifold that admits a K-contact structure but does not admit a semi-regular Sasakian structure. For this, we need two ingredients: (a) to construct a suitable simply connected symplectic 4-manifold with disjoint symplectic surfaces spanning the homology, all of them but one of genus 1 and the other of genus g>1, (b) to prove a bound on the second Betti number $b_2$ of an algebraic surface with $b_1=0$ and having disjoint complex curves spanning the homology when all of them but one are of genus 1 and the other of genus g>1.