AIM Workshop: Trisections and low-dimensional topology
March 20, 2017 - March 24, 2017
American Institute of Mathematics, San Jose, CA
This workshop, sponsored by AIM and the NSF, will be devoted to a new perspective on 4-dimensional topology introduced by Gay and Kirby in 2012: Every smooth 4-manifold can be decomposed into three simple pieces via a trisection, a generalization of a Heegaard splitting of a 3-manifold. The theory of trisections has expanded to include the relative settings of surfaces in 4-manifolds and 4-manifolds with boundary, and tantalizing evidence reveals that trisections may bridge the gap between 3- and 4-dimensional topology.