Whitney towers and gropes in 4–manifolds
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Abstract:
Many open problems and important theorems in low-dimensional topology have been formulated as statements about certain 2–complexes called gropes. This paper describes a precise correspondence between embedded gropes in 4–manifolds and the failure of the Whitney move in terms of iterated ‘towers’ of Whitney disks. The ‘flexibility’ of these Whitney towers is used to demonstrate some geometric consequences for knot and link concordance connected to $n$-solvability, $k$-cobordism and grope concordance. The key observation is that the essential structure of gropes and Whitney towers can be described by embedded unitrivalent trees which can be controlled during surgeries and Whitney moves. It is shown that a Whitney move in a Whitney tower induces an IHX (Jacobi) relation on the embedded trees.References
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Additional Information
- Rob Schneiderman
- Affiliation: Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, 251 Mercer Street, New York, New York 10012-1185
- Email: schneiderman@courant.nyu.edu
- Received by editor(s): March 7, 2004
- Received by editor(s) in revised form: May 25, 2004
- Published electronically: June 21, 2005
- Additional Notes: The author is an NSF VIGRE postdoctoral fellow at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.
- © Copyright 2005
American Mathematical Society
The copyright for this article reverts to public domain 28 years after publication. - Journal: Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 358 (2006), 4251-4278
- MSC (2000): Primary 57M99; Secondary 57M25
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.1090/S0002-9947-05-03768-2
- MathSciNet review: 2231378