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The bitwist construction, originally discovered by Cannon, Floyd, and Parry, gives us a new method for finding face pairing descriptions of 3-manifolds. In this paper, I will describe the construction in a way suitable for a more general audience than the original research papers. Along the way, I will describe Dehn Surgery and a set of moves which allows us to change the framings of a link without changing the topology of the manifold obtained by Dehn Surgery. Once the theory has been developed, I will apply it to find several bitwist representations of the Poincaré Sphere and 3-Torus. Finally, I discuss how one might attempt to find a set of moves that can take one bitwist representation of a manifold to any other bitwist representation of the same manifold. / Master of Science

We discuss how to realize simple Smale Flows on 3-manifolds. We focus on three questions: (1) What are the topological conjugate classes of Lorenz Smale flows that can be realized on S3? (2) Which 3-manifolds can also admit a Lorenz Smale flow? (3) What are the topological conjugate classes of simple Smale flows whose saddle set can be modeled by &nu(0+,0+,0,0) can be realized on S3? This dissertation extends the work of M. Sullivan and B. Yu.

We determine several families of so-called associative 3-dimensional manifolds in R7. Such manifolds are of interest because associative 3-cycles in G2 holonomy manifolds such as R6 × S1, whose universal cover is R7, are candidates for representations of fundamental particles in String Theory. We apply the classic results of Harvey and Lawson to find 3-manifolds which are graphs of functions f : Im H → H and which are invariant under a particular 1-parameter subgroup of G2, the automorphism group of the Cayley numbers, O. Systems of PDEs are derived and solved, some special cases of a classic theorem of Harvey and Lawson are investigated, and theorems aiding in the classification of all such manifolds described here are proven. It is found that in most of the cases examined, the resulting manifold must be of the form of the graph of a holomorphic function crossed with R. However, some examples of other types of graphs are also found.

In this thesis we study the finite quotients of 3-manifold groups, concerning both residual properties of the groups and the properties of the 3-manifolds that can be detected using finite quotients of the fundamental group. A key theme is the analysis of when two 3-manifold groups can have the same families of finite quotients. We make a detailed study of this 'profinite rigidity' problem for Seifert fibre spaces and prove complete classification results for these manifolds. From Seifert fibre spaces we continue on this trajectory and extend our classification results to all graph manifolds. We illustrate this classification with examples and several consequences, including for graph knots and for mapping class groups. The third part of the thesis concerns the behaviour of the finite p-group quotients of 3-manifold groups. In general these quotients may be scarce and poorly behaved. We give results showing that some of these issues may be resolved by passing to finite-sheeted covers of the manifold involved. We also prove theorems concerning the p-conjugacy separability of certain graph manifold groups. The concluding chapter of the thesis collects other results linking low-dimensional topology and finite quotients of groups. In particular we prove that finite quotients of a right-angled Artin group distinguish it from other right-angled Artin groups, and we give an argument detecting the prime decomposition of certain 3-manifold groups from the finite p-group quotients.

In this thesis we describe how to estimate the distance spanned in the pants graph by a train track splitting sequence on a surface, up to multiplicative and additive constants. If some moderate assumptions on a splitting sequence are satisfied, each vertex set of a train track in it will represent a vertex of a graph which is naturally quasi-isometric to the pants graph; moreover the splitting sequence gives an edge-path in this graph so, more precisely, our distance estimate holds between the extreme points of this path. The present distance estimate is inspired by a result of Masur, Mosher and Schleimer for distances in the marking graph. However, we can apply their line of proof only after some manipulation of the splitting sequence: a rearrangement, changing the order the elementary moves are performed in, so that the ones producing Dehn twists are brought together; and then an untwisting, which suppresses the majority of these latter moves to give a new sequence, which does not end with the same track as before, but does not include any portion that is almost stationary in the pants graph. The required distance is then, up to constants, the number of splits occurring in the untwisted sequence. A consequence of our main theorem together with a result of Brock is that, given a pseudo-Anosov self-diffeomorphism ψ of a surface S, the maximal splitting sequence introduced by Agol gives us an estimate for the hyperbolic volume of the mapping torus built from S and ψ. There are also some interesting consequences for the hyperbolic volume of a solid torus minus a closed braid, via a machinery employed by Dynnikov and Wiest.

Knot theory and 3-manifold topology are closely intertwined, and few invariants stand so firmly in the intersection of these two subjects as the tunnel number of a knot, denoted t(K). We describe two very general constructions that result in knot and link pairs which are subbaditive with respect to tunnel number under connect sum. Our constructions encompass all previously known examples and introduce many new ones. As an application we describe a class of knots K in the 3-sphere such that, for every manifold M obtained from an integral Dehn filling of E(K), g(E(K))>g(M).

In 2-dimensional topology, quotients of polygons by edge-pairings provide a rich source of examples of closed, connected, orientable surfaces. In fact, they provide all such examples. The 3-dimensional analogue of an edge-pairing of a polygon is a face-pairing of a faceted 3-ball. Unfortunately, quotients of faceted 3-balls by face-pairings rarely provide us with examples of 3-manifolds due to singularities that arise at the vertices. However, any face-pairing of a faceted 3-ball may be slighted modified so that its quotient is a genuine manifold, i.e. free of singularities. The modified face-pairing is called a twisted face-pairing. It is natural to ask which closed, connected, orientable 3-manifolds may be obtained as quotients of twisted face-pairings. In this paper, we focus on a special class of face-pairings called cycle-free twisted face-pairings and give description of their quotient spaces in terms of integer weighted graphs. We use this description to prove that most spherical 3-manifolds can be obtained as quotients of cycle-free twisted face-pairings, but the Poincaré homology 3-sphere cannot. / Master of Science

Um resultado clássico enunciado por M.A. Lancret em 1802 e provado por B. de Saint Venant em 1845 é: uma condição necessária e suficiente para que uma curva forme um ângulo constante com respeito a um campo de Killing unitário de R3 é que a razão entre a curvatura e a torção seja constante. Curvas deste tipo são chamadas hélices generalizadas. O problema de Lancret-de Saint Venant foi generalizado para curvas em outras variedades de dimensão três como, por exemplo, as formas espaciais e os grupos de Lie. Outra maneira de generalizar o estudo anterior é passar de curvas para superfícies, ou seja estudar as superfícies orientadas de 3-variedades Riemannianas cuja normal unitária faz um ângulo constante com certos campos de vetores privilegiados do espaço ambiente. Nesta dissertação estudaremos os resultados obtidos em [16, 24, 26, 27] sobre a classificação de curvas e superfícies de ângulo constante nas seguintes 3-variedades homogêneas: R3, o grupo de Heisenberg tridimensional e as esferas de Berger. / A classical result stated by M.A. Lancret in 1802 and first proved by B. de Saint Venant in 1845 is: a necessary and sufficient condition in order to a curve makes a constant angle with respect a unit Killing vector field of R3 is that the ratio of curvature to torsion be constant. Such curves are called general helix. The problem of Lancret-de Saint Venant has been generalized to curves in other three-dimensional manifolds as, for example, the space forms and the Lie groups. Another way to generalize the previous study is to pass from curves to surfaces, i.e. to study the oriented surfaces of Riemannian 3-manifolds for which the unit normal makes a constant angle with favored vector fields of the ambient space. In this dissertation we will study the results obtained in [16, 24, 26, 27] about the classification of constant angle curves and surfaces in the following homogeneous 3-manifolds: R3, the three-dimensional Heisenberg group and the Berger sphere.

Adams conjectured that unknotting tunnels of tunnel number 1 manifolds are always isotopic to a geodesic. We generalize this question to tunnel number n manifolds. We find that there exist complete hyperbolic structures and a choice of spine of a compression body with genus 1 negative boundary and genus n ≥ 3 outer boundary for which (n−2) edges of the spine self-intersect. We use this to show that there exist finite volume one-cusped hyperbolic manifolds with a system of n tunnels for which (n−1) of the tunnels are homotopic to geodesics arbitrarily close to self-intersecting. This gives evidence that the generalization of Adam's conjecture to tunnel number n ≥ 2 manifolds may be false.