We express the total space of a principal circle bundle over a connected sum of two manifolds in terms of the total spaces of circle bundles over each summand, provided certain conditions hold. We then apply this result to provide sufficient conditions for the existence of free circle and torus actions on connected sums of products of spheres and obtain a topological classification of closed, simply connected manifolds with a free cohomogeneity-four torus action. As a corollary, we obtain infinitely many manifolds with Riemannian metrics of positive Ricci curvature and isometric torus actions.

We show that all large enough positive integral surgeries on algebraic knots bound a 4-manifold with a negative definite plumbing tree, which we describe explicitly. Then we apply the lattice embedding obstruction coming from Donaldson’s Theorem to classify the ones of the form $S^3_n(T(p_1,k_1p_1+1; p_2, k_2p_2\pm 1))$ that also bound rational homology 4-balls.

In this paper, we generalize the original idea of Thurston for the so-called Mather-Thurston’s theorem for foliated bundles to prove new variants of this theorem for PL homeomorphisms and contactormorphisms. These versions answer questions posed by Gelfand-Fuks ([GF73, Section 5]) and Greenberg ([Gre92]) on PL foliations and Rybicki ([Ryb10, Section 11]) on contactomorphisms. The interesting point about the original Thurston’s technique compared to the better-known Segal-McDuff’s proof of the Mather-Thurston theorem is that it gives a compactly supported c-principle theorem without knowing the relevant local statement on open balls. In the appendix, we show that Thurston’s fragmentation implies the non-abelian Poincare duality theorem and its generalization using blob complexes ([MW12, Theorem 7.3.1]).

To the memory of John Mather.

For every $k \geq 2$ and $n \geq 2$, we construct n pairwise homotopically inequivalent simply connected, closed $4k$-dimensional manifolds, all of which are stably diffeomorphic to one another. Each of these manifolds has hyperbolic intersection form and is stably parallelisable. In dimension four, we exhibit an analogous phenomenon for spin$^{c}$ structures on $S^2 \times S^2$. For $m\geq 1$, we also provide similar $(4m-1)$-connected $8m$-dimensional examples, where the number of homotopy types in a stable diffeomorphism class is related to the order of the image of the stable J-homomorphism $\pi _{4m-1}(SO) \to \pi ^s_{4m-1}$.

We define a graph encoding the structure of contact surgery on contact $3$ -manifolds and analyse its basic properties and some of its interesting subgraphs.

In this note, we show that given a closed connected oriented $3$ -manifold M, there exists a knot K in M such that the manifold $M'$ obtained from M by performing an integer surgery admits an open book decomposition which embeds into the trivial open book of the $5$ -sphere $S^5.$

Let $X^{n}$ be an oriented closed generalized $n$-manifold, $n\ge 5$. In our recent paper (Proc. Edinb. Math. Soc. (2) 63 (2020), no. 2, 597–607), we have constructed a map $t:\mathcal {N}(X^{n}) \to H^{st}_{n} ( X^{n}; \mathbb{L}^{+})$ which extends the normal invariant map for the case when $X^{n}$ is a topological $n$-manifold. Here, $\mathcal {N}(X^{n})$ denotes the set of all normal bordism classes of degree one normal maps $(f,\,b): M^{n} \to X^{n},$ and $H^{st}_{*} ( X^{n}; \mathbb{E})$ denotes the Steenrod homology of the spectrum $\mathbb{E}$. An important non-trivial question arose whether the map $t$ is bijective (note that this holds in the case when $X^{n}$ is a topological $n$-manifold). It is the purpose of this paper to prove that the answer to this question is affirmative.

The aim of this paper is to show the importance of the Steenrod construction of homology theories for the disassembly process in surgery on a generalized n-manifold Xn, in order to produce an element of generalized homology theory, which is basic for calculations. In particular, we show how to construct an element of the nth Steenrod homology group $H^{st}_{n} (X^{n}, \mathbb {L}^+)$, where 𝕃+ is the connected covering spectrum of the periodic surgery spectrum 𝕃, avoiding the use of the geometric splitting procedure, the use of which is standard in surgery on topological manifolds.

We give a method for constructing a Legendrian representative of a knot in $S^{3}$ which realizes its maximal Thurston–Bennequin number under a certain condition. The method utilizes Stein handle decompositions of $D^{4}$ , and the resulting Legendrian representative is often very complicated (relative to the complexity of the topological knot type). As an application, we construct infinitely many knots in $S^{3}$ each of which yields a reducible 3-manifold by a Legendrian surgery in the standard tight contact structure. This disproves a conjecture of Lidman and Sivek.

We consider orientable closed connected 3-manifolds obtained by performing Dehn surgery on the components of some classical links such as Borromean rings and twisted Whitehead links. We find geometric presentations of their fundamental groups and describe many of them as 2-fold branched coverings of the 3-sphere. Finally, we obtain some topological applications on the manifolds given by exceptional surgeries on hyperbolic 2-bridge knots.

Nous démontrons que tous les plongements d’une variété compacte sans bord et simplement connexe de dimension quatre dans la sphère de dimension six sont concordants.

Let $M$ be a compact, connected, orientable 3-manifold whose boundary is a torus and whose interior admits a complete hyperbolic metric of finite volume. In this paper we show that if theminimal Culler-Shalen norm of a non-zero class in ${{H}_{1}}(\partial M)$ is larger than 8, then the finite surgery conjecture holds for $M$. This means that there are at most 5 Dehn fillings of $M$ which can yieldmanifolds having cyclic or finite fundamental groups and the distance between any slopes yielding such manifolds is at most 3.

We show that normal and stable normal invariants of polarized homotopy equivalences of lens spaces $M=\,L({{2}^{m}};\,{{r}_{1}},...,\,{{r}_{n}})$ and $N\,=\,L({{2}^{m}};\,{{s}_{1}},...,{{s}_{n}})$ are determined by certain $\ell $-polynomials evaluated on the elementary symmetric functions ${{\sigma }_{i}}\,(r_{1}^{2},...,r_{n}^{2})$ and ${{\sigma }_{i}}(s_{1}^{2},...,s_{n}^{2})$. Each polynomial ${{\ell }_{k}}$ appears as the homogeneous part of degree $k$ in the Hirzebruch multiplicative $L$-sequence. When $n=8$, the elementary symmetric functions alone determine the relevant normal invariants.