Outer automorphism groups of Bieberbach groups.
This paper gives an expository account of the author’s work on the “second” obstruction to deforming a pseudo-isotopy on a smooth compact manifold to an isotopy. Using earlier results on the “first” obstruction, due independently to J.B. Wagoner and the author, this completes the generalization of J. Cerf’s pseudo-isotopy theorem to the non-simply-connected case.
We describe partial semi-simplicial resolutions of moduli spaces of surfaces with tangential structure. This allows us to prove a homological stability theorem for these moduli spaces, which often improves the known stability ranges and gives explicit stability ranges in many new cases. In each of these cases the stable homology can be identified using the methods of Galatius, Madsen, Tillmann and Weiss.