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The Disjoint Curve Property

Student-Run Geometry/Topology Seminar

Speaker: Matt Rathbun, UC Davis
Location: 3106 MSB
Start time: Tue, Feb 5 2008, 1:10PM

The Disjoint Curve Property of a Heegaard Splitting, introduced by Abby Thompson, means that you can find a disk properly embedded in each handlebody, and a third curve on the splitting surface disjoint from the boundaries of the disks. I will give an overview of a paper by Saul Schleimer which uses Normal Surface Theory to show that if a splitting has large enough genus (compared to the number of tetrahedra in a triangulation of the manifold), then it has the Disjoint Curve Property.