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.
Let be a differentiable manifold and . Then can be represented by a smooth embedding , where is a (not necessarily connected) surface that is compact and without boundary. The Thurston norm of is then defined to be [1]
where the minimum is taken over all embedded surfaces (the being the connected components) representing as above, and is the absolute value of the Euler characteristic for surfaces which are not spheres (and 0 for spheres).
This function satisfies the following properties:
These properties imply that extends to a function on which can then be extended by continuity to a seminorm on . [2] By Poincaré duality, one can define the Thurston norm on .
When is compact with boundary, the Thurston norm is defined in a similar manner on the relative homology group and its Poincaré dual .
It follows from further work of David Gabai [3] that one can also define the Thurston norm using only immersed surfaces. This implies that the Thurston norm is also equal to half the Gromov norm on homology.
The Thurston norm was introduced in view of its applications to fiberings and foliations of 3-manifolds.
The unit ball of the Thurston norm of a 3-manifold is a polytope with integer vertices. It can be used to describe the structure of the set of fiberings of over the circle: if can be written as the mapping torus of a diffeomorphism of a surface then the embedding represents a class in a top-dimensional (or open) face of : moreover all other integer points on the same face are also fibers in such a fibration. [4]
Embedded surfaces which minimise the Thurston norm in their homology class are exactly the closed leaves of foliations of . [3]
In mathematics, homology is a general way of associating a sequence of algebraic objects, such as abelian groups or modules, with other mathematical objects such as topological spaces. Homology groups were originally defined in algebraic topology. Similar constructions are available in a wide variety of other contexts, such as abstract algebra, groups, Lie algebras, Galois theory, and algebraic geometry.
In differential geometry, a Riemannian manifold or Riemannian space(M, g), so called after the German mathematician Bernhard Riemann, is a real, smooth manifold M equipped with a positive-definite inner product gp on the tangent space TpM at each point p.
In mathematics, and more specifically in algebraic topology and polyhedral combinatorics, the Euler characteristic is a topological invariant, a number that describes a topological space's shape or structure regardless of the way it is bent. It is commonly denoted by .
In topology, a branch of mathematics, two continuous functions from one topological space to another are called homotopic if one can be "continuously deformed" into the other, such a deformation being called a homotopy between the two functions. A notable use of homotopy is the definition of homotopy groups and cohomotopy groups, important invariants in algebraic topology.
In mathematics, specifically in differential topology, Morse theory enables one to analyze the topology of a manifold by studying differentiable functions on that manifold. According to the basic insights of Marston Morse, a typical differentiable function on a manifold will reflect the topology quite directly. Morse theory allows one to find CW structures and handle decompositions on manifolds and to obtain substantial information about their homology.
In mathematics, a foliation is an equivalence relation on an n-manifold, the equivalence classes being connected, injectively immersed submanifolds, all of the same dimension p, modeled on the decomposition of the real coordinate space Rn into the cosets x + Rp of the standardly embedded subspace Rp. The equivalence classes are called the leaves of the foliation. If the manifold and/or the submanifolds are required to have a piecewise-linear, differentiable, or analytic structure then one defines piecewise-linear, differentiable, or analytic foliations, respectively. In the most important case of differentiable foliation of class Cr it is usually understood that r ≥ 1. The number p is called the dimension of the foliation and q = n − p is called its codimension.
In mathematics, cobordism is a fundamental equivalence relation on the class of compact manifolds of the same dimension, set up using the concept of the boundary of a manifold. Two manifolds of the same dimension are cobordant if their disjoint union is the boundary of a compact manifold one dimension higher.
In the mathematical field of geometric topology, a Heegaard splitting is a decomposition of a compact oriented 3-manifold that results from dividing it into two handlebodies.
In mathematics, an incompressible surface is a surface properly embedded in a 3-manifold, which, in intuitive terms, is a "nontrivial" surface that cannot be simplified. In non-mathematical terms, the surface of a suitcase is compressible, because we could cut the handle and shrink it into the surface. But a Conway sphere is incompressible, because there are essential parts of a knot or link both inside and out, so there is no way to move the entire knot or link to one side of the punctured sphere. The mathematical definition is as follows. There are two cases to consider. A sphere is incompressible if both inside and outside the sphere there are some obstructions that prevent the sphere from shrinking to a point and also prevent the sphere from expanding to encompass all of space. A surface other than a sphere is incompressible if any disk with its boundary on the surface spans a disk in the surface.
In mathematics, a 3-manifold is a space that locally looks like Euclidean 3-dimensional space. A 3-manifold can be thought of as a possible shape of the universe. Just as a sphere looks like a plane to a small enough observer, all 3-manifolds look like our universe does to a small enough observer. This is made more precise in the definition below.
In mathematics, the Todd class is a certain construction now considered a part of the theory in algebraic topology of characteristic classes. The Todd class of a vector bundle can be defined by means of the theory of Chern classes, and is encountered where Chern classes exist — most notably in differential topology, the theory of complex manifolds and algebraic geometry. In rough terms, a Todd class acts like a reciprocal of a Chern class, or stands in relation to it as a conormal bundle does to a normal bundle.
A Seifert fiber space is a 3-manifold together with a decomposition as a disjoint union of circles. In other words, it is a -bundle over a 2-dimensional orbifold. Many 3-manifolds are Seifert fiber spaces, and they account for all compact oriented manifolds in 6 of the 8 Thurston geometries of the geometrization conjecture.
In mathematics, the Grothendieck group construction constructs an abelian group from a commutative monoid M in the most universal way, in the sense that any abelian group containing a homomorphic image of M will also contain a homomorphic image of the Grothendieck group of M. The Grothendieck group construction takes its name from a specific case in category theory, introduced by Alexander Grothendieck in his proof of the Grothendieck–Riemann–Roch theorem, which resulted in the development of K-theory. This specific case is the monoid of isomorphism classes of objects of an abelian category, with the direct sum as its operation.
In mathematics, a manifold is a topological space that locally resembles Euclidean space near each point. More precisely, an n-dimensional manifold, or n-manifold for short, is a topological space with the property that each point has a neighborhood that is homeomorphic to an open subset of n-dimensional Euclidean space.
In mathematics, a complex torus is a particular kind of complex manifold M whose underlying smooth manifold is a torus in the usual sense. Here N must be the even number 2n, where n is the complex dimension of M.
In mathematics, an algebraic variety V in projective space is a complete intersection if the ideal of V is generated by exactly codim V elements. That is, if V has dimension m and lies in projective space Pn, there should exist n − m homogeneous polynomials:
In mathematics, more precisely in group theory and hyperbolic geometry, Arithmetic Kleinian groups are a special class of Kleinian groups constructed using orders in quaternion algebras. They are particular instances of arithmetic groups. An arithmetic hyperbolic three-manifold is the quotient of hyperbolic space by an arithmetic Kleinian group. These manifolds include some particularly beautiful or remarkable examples.
In mathematics the Thurston boundary of Teichmüller space of a surface is obtained as the boundary of its closure in the projective space of functionals on simple closed curves on the surface. It can be interpreted as the space of projective measured foliations on the surface.
In mathematics, and especially differential and algebraic geometry, K-stability is an algebro-geometric stability condition, for complex manifolds and complex algebraic varieties. The notion of K-stability was first introduced by Gang Tian and reformulated more algebraically later by Simon Donaldson. The definition was inspired by a comparison to geometric invariant theory (GIT) stability. In the special case of Fano varieties, K-stability precisely characterises the existence of Kähler–Einstein metrics. More generally, on any compact complex manifold, K-stability is conjectured to be equivalent to the existence of constant scalar curvature Kähler metrics.
In geometry, a valuation is a finitely additive function on a collection of admissible subsets of a fixed set with values in an abelian semigroup. For example, the Lebesgue measure is a valuation on finite unions of convex bodies of Euclidean space Other examples of valuations on finite unions of convex bodies are the surface area, the mean width, and the Euler characteristic.