We classify the connected orientable 2-manifolds whose mapping class groups have a dense conjugacy class. We also show that the mapping class group of a connected orientable 2-manifold has a comeager conjugacy class if and only if the mapping class group is trivial.
We prove that the mapping class group of a surface obtained from removing a Cantor set from either the 2-sphere, the plane, or the interior of the closed 2-disk has no proper countable-index subgroups. The proof is an application of the automatic con
tinuity of these groups, which was established by Mann. As corollaries, we see that these groups do not contain any proper finite-index subgroups and that each of these groups have trivial abelianization.
We study the TQFT mapping class group representations for surfaces with boundary associated with the $SU(2)$ gauge group, or equivalently the quantum group $U_q(Sl(2))$. We show that at a prime root of unity, these representations are all irreducible
. We also examine braid group representations for transcendental values of the quantum parameter, where we show that the image of every mapping class group is Zariski dense.
These are the lecture notes for my course at the 2011 Park City Mathematics Graduate Summer School. The first two lectures covered the basics of the Torelli group and the Johnson homomorphism, and the third and fourth lectures discussed the second co
homology group of the level p congruence subgroup of the mapping class group, following my papers The second rational homology group of the moduli space of curves with level structures and The Picard group of the moduli space of curves with level structures.
It is known that every infinite index quasi-convex subgroup $H$ of a non-elementary hyperbolic group $G$ is a free factor in a larger quasi-convex subgroup of $G$. We give a probabilistic generalization of this result. That is, we show that when $R$
is a subgroup generated by independent random walks in $G$, then $langle H, Rranglecong Hast R$ with probability going to one as the lengths of the random walks go to infinity and this subgroup is quasi-convex in $G$. Moreover, our results hold for a large class of groups acting on hyperbolic metric spaces and subgroups with quasi-convex orbits. In particular, when $G$ is the mapping class group of a surface and $H$ is a convex cocompact subgroup we show that $langle H, Rrangle$ is convex cocompact and isomorphic to $ Hast R$.