William J. Floyd is an American mathematician specializing in topology. He is currently a professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Floyd received a PhD in mathematics from Princeton University 1978 under the direction of William Thurston. [1]
Most of Floyd's research is in the areas of geometric topology and geometric group theory.
Floyd and Allen Hatcher classified all the incompressible surfaces in punctured-torus bundles over the circle. [2]
In a 1980 paper [3] Floyd introduced a way to compactify a finitely generated group by adding to it a boundary which came to be called the Floyd boundary. [4] [5] Floyd also wrote a number of joint papers with James W. Cannon and Walter R. Parry exploring a combinatorial approach to the Cannon conjecture [6] [7] [8] using finite subdivision rules. This represents one of the few plausible lines of attack of the conjecture. [9]
In mathematics, differential topology is the field dealing with the topological properties and smooth properties of smooth manifolds. In this sense differential topology is distinct from the closely related field of differential geometry, which concerns the geometric properties of smooth manifolds, including notions of size, distance, and rigid shape. By comparison differential topology is concerned with coarser properties, such as the number of holes in a manifold, its homotopy type, or the structure of its diffeomorphism group. Because many of these coarser properties may be captured algebraically, differential topology has strong links to algebraic topology.
In the part of mathematics referred to as topology, a surface is a two-dimensional manifold. Some surfaces arise as the boundaries of three-dimensional solid figures; for example, the sphere is the boundary of the solid ball. Other surfaces arise as graphs of functions of two variables; see the figure at right. However, surfaces can also be defined abstractly, without reference to any ambient space. For example, the Klein bottle is a surface that cannot be embedded in three-dimensional Euclidean space.
William Paul Thurston was an American mathematician. He was a pioneer in the field of low-dimensional topology and was awarded the Fields Medal in 1982 for his contributions to the study of 3-manifolds.
In mathematics, Thurston's geometrization conjecture states that each of certain three-dimensional topological spaces has a unique geometric structure that can be associated with it. It is an analogue of the uniformization theorem for two-dimensional surfaces, which states that every simply connected Riemann surface can be given one of three geometries . In three dimensions, it is not always possible to assign a single geometry to a whole topological space. Instead, the geometrization conjecture states that every closed 3-manifold can be decomposed in a canonical way into pieces that each have one of eight types of geometric structure. The conjecture was proposed by William Thurston (1982), and implies several other conjectures, such as the Poincaré conjecture and Thurston's elliptization conjecture.
In mathematics, the JSJ decomposition, also known as the toral decomposition, is a topological construct given by the following theorem:
Discrete geometry and combinatorial geometry are branches of geometry that study combinatorial properties and constructive methods of discrete geometric objects. Most questions in discrete geometry involve finite or discrete sets of basic geometric objects, such as points, lines, planes, circles, spheres, polygons, and so forth. The subject focuses on the combinatorial properties of these objects, such as how they intersect one another, or how they may be arranged to cover a larger object.
Geometric group theory is an area in mathematics devoted to the study of finitely generated groups via exploring the connections between algebraic properties of such groups and topological and geometric properties of spaces on which these groups act.
In mathematics, a 3-manifold is a topological space that locally looks like a three-dimensional Euclidean 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.
Allen Edward Hatcher is an American topologist.
In mathematics, more precisely in topology and differential geometry, a hyperbolic 3-manifold is a manifold of dimension 3 equipped with a hyperbolic metric, that is a Riemannian metric which has all its sectional curvatures equal to −1. It is generally required that this metric be also complete: in this case the manifold can be realised as a quotient of the 3-dimensional hyperbolic space by a discrete group of isometries.
In mathematics, an atoroidal 3-manifold is one that does not contain an essential torus. There are two major variations in this terminology: an essential torus may be defined geometrically, as an embedded, non-boundary parallel, incompressible torus, or it may be defined algebraically, as a subgroup of its fundamental group that is not conjugate to a peripheral subgroup. The terminology is not standardized, and different authors require atoroidal 3-manifolds to satisfy certain additional restrictions. For instance:
In mathematics, Thurston's classification theorem characterizes homeomorphisms of a compact orientable surface. William Thurston's theorem completes the work initiated by Jakob Nielsen (1944).
The Geometry Festival is an annual mathematics conference held in the United States.
John Robert Stallings Jr. was a mathematician known for his seminal contributions to geometric group theory and 3-manifold topology. Stallings was a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley where he had been a faculty member since 1967. He published over 50 papers, predominantly in the areas of geometric group theory and the topology of 3-manifolds. Stallings' most important contributions include a proof, in a 1960 paper, of the Poincaré Conjecture in dimensions greater than six and a proof, in a 1971 paper, of the Stallings theorem about ends of groups.
James W. Cannon is an American mathematician working in the areas of low-dimensional topology and geometric group theory. He was an Orson Pratt Professor of Mathematics at Brigham Young University.
In the mathematical subject of geometric group theory, a Dehn function, named after Max Dehn, is an optimal function associated to a finite group presentation which bounds the area of a relation in that group in terms of the length of that relation. The growth type of the Dehn function is a quasi-isometry invariant of a finitely presented group. The Dehn function of a finitely presented group is also closely connected with non-deterministic algorithmic complexity of the word problem in groups. In particular, a finitely presented group has solvable word problem if and only if the Dehn function for a finite presentation of this group is recursive. The notion of a Dehn function is motivated by isoperimetric problems in geometry, such as the classic isoperimetric inequality for the Euclidean plane and, more generally, the notion of a filling area function that estimates the area of a minimal surface in a Riemannian manifold in terms of the length of the boundary curve of that surface.
Mladen Bestvina is a Croatian-American mathematician working in the area of geometric group theory. He is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Utah.
In mathematics, a finite subdivision rule is a recursive way of dividing a polygon or other two-dimensional shape into smaller and smaller pieces. Subdivision rules in a sense are generalizations of regular geometric fractals. Instead of repeating exactly the same design over and over, they have slight variations in each stage, allowing a richer structure while maintaining the elegant style of fractals. Subdivision rules have been used in architecture, biology, and computer science, as well as in the study of hyperbolic manifolds. Substitution tilings are a well-studied type of subdivision rule.
In mathematics, the curve complex is a simplicial complex C(S) associated to a finite-type surface S, which encodes the combinatorics of simple closed curves on S. The curve complex turned out to be a fundamental tool in the study of the geometry of the Teichmüller space, of mapping class groups and of Kleinian groups. It was introduced by W.J.Harvey in 1978.
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