Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Morse theory is a standard concept used in the study of manifolds.  PL-Morse theory is a variant of Morse theory developed by Bestvina and Brady that is used to study simplicial complexes.  We develop an extension of PL-Morse theory to simplicial complexes equipped with an action of a group G.  We will discuss some of the basic ideas in this theory and hopefully sketch proofs of some forthcoming results pertaining to the homology of the Torelli group.

Given two knots K_1 and K_2, their 0-surgery manifolds S_0^3(K_1) and S_0^3(K_2) are homology cobordant rel meridian if they are homology cobordant preserving the homology class of the positively oriented meridian. It is known that if K_1 ∼ K_2, then S_0^3(K_1) and S_0^3(K_2) are homology cobordant rel meridian. The converse of this statement was first disproved by Cochran-Franklin-Hedden-Horn.  In this talk we will provide a new counterexample, the pair of knots 4_1 and M(4_1) where M is the Mazur satellite operator. S_0^3(4_1) and S_0^3(M(4_1)) are homology cobordant rel meridian, but 4_1 and M(4_1) are non-concordant and have concordance orders 2 and infinity, respectively. 

I will revisit the relation between Anosov 3-flows and invariant volume forms, from a contact geometric point of view. Consequently, I will give a contact geometric characterization of when a flow with dominated splitting is Anosov based on its divergence, as well as a Reeb dynamical interpretation of when such flows are volume preserving. Moreover, I will discuss the implications of this study on the surgery theory of Anosov 3-flows. In particular, I will conclude that the Goodman-Fried surgery of Anosov flows can be reconstructed, using a bi-contact surgery of Salmoiraghi.

One interesting question in low-dimensional topology is to understand the structure of mapping class group of a given manifold. In dimension 2, this topic is very well studied. The structure of this group is known for various 3-manifolds as well (ref- Hatcher's famous work on Smale's conjecture). But virtually nothing is known in dimension 4. In this talk I will try to motivate why this problem in dimension 4 is interesting and how it is different from dimension 2 and 3. I will demonstrate some "exotic" phenomena and if time permits, I will talk a few words on my upcoming work with Jianfeng Lin.