The paper gives an account of the recent development in 3-dimensional contact geometry. The central result of the paper states that there exists a unique tight contact structure on . Together with the earlier classification of overtwisted contact structures on 3-manifolds this result completes the classification of contact structures on .
We prove a structure theorem for closed, orientable 5-manifolds with fundamental group and second Stiefel-Whitney class equal to zero on . This structure theorem is then used to construct contact structures on such manifolds by applying contact surgery to fake projective spaces and certain -quotients of .
For a finitely generated group, we study the relations between its rank, the maximal rank of its free quotient, called co-rank (inner rank, cut number), and the maximal rank of its free abelian quotient, called the Betti number. We show that any combination of the group's rank, co-rank, and Betti number within obvious constraints is realized for some finitely presented group (for Betti number equal to rank, the group can be chosen torsion-free). In addition, we show that the Betti number is additive...
Given a finitely generated subgroup G of the group of affine transformations acting on the complex line C, we are interested in the quotient Fix( G)/G. The purpose of this note is to establish when this quotient is finite and in this case its cardinality. We give an application to the qualitative study of polynomial planar vector fields at a neighborhood of a nilpotent singular point.
Let Y be a connected group and let f: X → Y be a covering map with the total space X being connected. We consider the following question: Is it possible to define a topological group structure on X in such a way that f becomes a homomorphism of topological groups. This holds in some particular cases: if Y is a pathwise connected and locally pathwise connected group or if f is a finite-sheeted covering map over a compact connected group Y. However, using shape-theoretic techniques and Fox's notion...
Coverings of S3 branched over iterated torus links appear naturally and very often in Algebraic Geometry. The natural graph-manifold structure of the exterior of an iterated torus link induces a graph-structure in the branched covers. In this paper we give an algorithm to compute valued graphs representing a branched cover given the monodromy representation associated to the covering. The algorithm is completely mechanized in order to be programmed, and can also be used for finding representation...