Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Turaev Surfaces And Toroidally Alternating Knots, Seungwon Kim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this thesis, we study knots and links via their alternating diagrams on closed orientable surfaces. Every knot or link has such a diagram by a construction of Turaev, which is called the Turaev surface of the link. Links that have an alternating diagram on a torus were defined by Adams as toroidally alternating. For a toroidally alternating link, the minimal genus of its Turaev surface may be greater than one. Hence, these surfaces provide different topological measures of how far a link is from being alternating.

First, we classify link diagrams with Turaev genus one and two in terms …

Intercusp Geodesics And Cusp Shapes Of Fully Augmented Links, Rochy Flint

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

We study the geometry of fully augmented link complements in the 3-sphere by looking at their link diagrams. We extend the method introduced by Thistlethwaite and Tsvietkova to fully augmented links and define a system of algebraic equations in terms of parameters coming from edges and crossings of the link diagrams. Combining it with the work of Purcell, we show that the solutions to these algebraic equations are related to the cusp shapes of fully augmented link complements. As an application we use the cusp shapes to study the commensurability classes of fully augmented links.

Manifold Convergence: Sewing Sequences Of Riemannian Manifolds With Positive Or Nonnegative Scalar Curvature, Jorge E. Basilio

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this thesis, we develop a new method of performing surgery on 3-dimensional manifolds called "sewing" and use this technique to construct sequences of Riemannian manifolds with positive or nonnegative scalar curvature. The foundation of our method is a strengthening of the Gromov-Lawson tunnel construction which guarantees the existence of “tiny” and arbitrarily “short” tunnels. We study the limits of sequences of sewn spaces under the Gromov-Hausdorff (GH) and Sormani-Wenger Instrinsic-Flat (SWIF) distances and discuss to what extent the notion of scalar curvature extends to these spaces. We give three applications of the sewing technique to demonstrate that stability theorems …