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Bing's Thm- The first step in a connection between knots and Heegaard Genus

Student-Run Geometry/Topology Seminar

Speaker: Marion Moore, UC Davis
Location: 2112 MSB
Start time: Tue, Nov 13 2007, 1:10PM

It has been shown that given a closed 3-manifold M, M has a genus g Heegaard splitting if and only if any knot in M can be ambient isotoped to lie inside a genus g handlebody. The most straightforward case is S^3 (the only manifold with a genus 0 Heegaard splitting), which gives us Bing's Thm: If M is a closed orientable 3-manifold such that any knot in M lies interior to a ball in M, then M is homeomorphic to S^3. In this talk I will give background, and a proof to the theorem.