Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

There has been a recent interest in studying surfaces of infinite type, i.e. surfaces with infinitely-generated fundamental groups. In this talk, we will focus on their mapping class groups, often called big mapping class groups. In contrast to the finite-type case, there are many open questions regarding the basic algebraic and topological properties of big mapping class groups. I will discuss several such questions and provide some answers. In particular, I will discuss automorphism groups of mapping class groups as well as relations between topological invariants of a surface and algebraic invariants of its mapping class group. The results in the talk are based on recent joint work with Priyam Patel and ongoing joint work with Javier Aramayona and Priyam Patel.

Certain fibered hyperbolic 3-manifolds admit a layered veering triangulation, which can be constructed algorithmically given the stable lamination of the monodromy. These triangulations were introduced by Agol in 2011, and have been further studied by several others in the years since. We present experimental results which shed light on the combinatorial structure of veering triangulations, and its relation to certain topological invariants of the underlying manifold. We will begin by discussing essential background material, including hyperbolic manifolds and ideal triangulations, and more particularly fibered hyperbolic manifolds and the construction of the veering triangulation.

We give a simple geometric criterion for an element to normally generate the mapping class group of a surface. As an application of this criterion, we show that when a surface has genus at least 3, every periodic mapping class except for the hyperelliptic involution normally generates. We also give examples of pseudo-Anosov elements that normally generate when genus is at least 2, answering a question of D. Long.

We study the uniqueness of optimal configurations in extremal combinatorics. An empirical experience suggests that optimal solutions to extremal graph theory problems can be made asymptotically unique by introducing additional constraints. Lovasz conjectured that this phenomenon is true in general: every finite feasible set of subgraph density constraints can be extended further by a finite set of density constraints such that the resulting set is satisfied by an asymptotically unique graph. We will present a counterexample to this conjecture and discuss related results. The talk is based on joint work with Andrzej Grzesik and Laszlo Miklos Lovasz.