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Speaker:Nick Meyer, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
Title:
Heegaard Splittings and Trisections 101: A Crash Course in Manifold Decompositions in Dimensions Three and Four
Abstract:In this talk, I will discuss Heegaard splittings of 3-manifolds and trisections of 4-manifolds. These decompositions cut the manifold into 1-handlebodies of appropriate dimension whose common intersection is a closed, orientable surface. By studying these decompositions, we obtain lots of information about the manifolds that they determine. This talk is based in part on David Gay's "From Heegaard splittings to trisections; porting 3-dimensional ideas to dimension 4.