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The questions appeared following Thurston's announcement of the geometrization conjecture, which proposed that all compact 3-manifolds could be decomposed into geometric pieces. [1] This conjecture , later proven by Grigori Perelman in 2003, represented a complete classification of 3-manifolds and included the famous Poincaré conjecture as a ...
The prime decomposition theorem for 3-manifolds states that every compact, orientable 3-manifold is the connected sum of a unique (up to homeomorphism) collection of prime 3-manifolds. A manifold is prime if it cannot be presented as a connected sum of more than one manifold, none of which is the sphere of the same dimension.
Familiar examples of two-dimensional manifolds include the sphere, torus, and Klein bottle; this book concentrates on three-dimensional manifolds, and on two-dimensional surfaces within them. A particular focus is a Heegaard splitting, a two-dimensional surface that partitions a 3-manifold into two handlebodies. It aims to present the main ...
The geometry and topology of three-manifolds is a set of widely circulated notes for a graduate course taught at Princeton University by William Thurston from 1978 to 1980 describing his work on 3-manifolds. They were written by Thurston, assisted by students William Floyd and Steven Kerchoff. [1]
In mathematics, the Lickorish–Wallace theorem in the theory of 3-manifolds states that any closed, orientable, connected 3-manifold may be obtained by performing Dehn surgery on a framed link in the 3-sphere with ±1 surgery coefficients. Furthermore, each component of the link can be assumed to be unknotted.
Once a small subfield of geometric topology, the theory of 3-manifolds has experienced tremendous growth in the latter half of the 20th century. The methods used tend to be quite specific to three dimensions, since different phenomena occur for 4-manifolds and higher dimensions.
The Weeks manifold is the hyperbolic three-manifold of smallest volume [3] and the Meyerhoff manifold is the one of next smallest volume. The complement in the three-sphere of the figure-eight knot is an arithmetic hyperbolic three-manifold [4] and attains the smallest volume among all cusped hyperbolic three-manifolds. [5]
In mathematics, the Thurston norm is a function on the second homology group of an oriented 3-manifold introduced by William Thurston, which measures in a natural way the topological complexity of homology classes represented by surfaces.