A class of 4-pseudomanifolds similar to the lense spaces.
An approach to construction of topological invariants of the Reshetikhin-Turaev-Witten type of 3- and 4-dimensional manifolds in the framework of SU(2) Chern-Simons gauge theory and its hidden (quantum) gauge symmetry is presented.
We give a self-contained introduction to the theory of shadows as a tool to study smooth 3-manifolds and 4-manifolds. The goal of the present paper is twofold: on the one hand, it is intended to be a shortcut to a basic use of the theory of shadows, on the other hand it gives a sketchy overview of some of the most recent results on shadows. No original result is proved here and most of the details of the proofs are left out.
Using the notion of relative presentation due to Bogley and Pride, we give a new proof of a theorem of Prishchepov on the asphericity of certain symmetric presentations of groups. Then we obtain further results and applications to topology of low-dimensional manifolds.