## A primer on mapping class groups

Benson Farb and Dan Margalit have just finished the final version of A Primer on Mapping Class Groups, to appear from Princeton University Press next year.  And it’s available in .pdf at Dan’s web page.  To the extent I know anything about mapping class groups, it’s because of this book!  Highly recommended for anyone interested in finding a way into this very active area of topology, which has heretofore not been so easy to learn about unless you have the luck to sit at the feet of a master.  Is it too much to say I expect the book to become “the Hartshorne of the mapping class group?”

## The space of unknots and the space of unknotted ropes

Here’s something I didn’t know.  Suppose we consider the space K of “long knots” — embeddings of R into R^3, which send t to (t,0,0) whenever |t| > 1.  By closing up the large |t| ends of the arc, you get a knot in S^3.

The path component of K containing the embedding of R along the x-axis is the space of long unknots.  Hatcher proved, as a consequence of his proof of Smale’s conjecture, that the space of long unknots is contractible!  Hatcher also proved that the space of short unknots is homotopic to the Grassmannian of 2-planes in 4-space.  (I take it this follows from the contractibility of the space of long unknots, but didn’t think about it.)  Moreover, Hatcher proves in the unpublished “Topological Moduli Spaces of Knots” that every connected component of K is a $K(\pi,1)$.  When the component corresponds to a torus knot, the fundamental group is Z: for a hyperbolic knot, it is ZxZ.

How do we get a circle in the space of long knots?  Hatcher makes a lovely “moving bead” argument on p.3 of the linked preprint.  Let S be a “short knot” of the given type, i.e. an embedding of S^1 into S^3.  For each point x on S, draw a small bead B around x; then the complement of B in S^3 looks like R^3, and the segment of the knot outside the bead is a long knot.  Now let the bead slide around the knot.  For each x, you get a long knot in the same isotopy class, and this gives a circle contained in the given connected component of K.

I was thinking about this because of Greg Buck‘s very interesting colloquium yesterday.  Greg is interested in the space of knots with positive thickness — what you might call the space of knotted ropes.  Let’s just think about the unknot.  For any knot K in R^3, we can define the radius of K to be the minimal distance between a point x on K and another point on K which lies on the plane through x perpendicular to the knot.  Let U_r be the space of unknots of radius r.  U_0 is just the space considered by Hatcher above, a Gr(2,4).  As we increase r, the space U_r  gets smaller — at some point, it vanishes entirely.  Buck presented a physical argument that U_r is disconnected for some intermediate values of r:  that is, he passed around a  thick closed rope which couldn’t be untangled, but whose meridian is an unknot.

Beyond that, how does the topology of U_r vary with r?  I have no idea — but what a beautiful question!  It is, of course, very reminiscent of questions about configurations of hard discs in a box discussed here earlier.

Buck’s talk centered on an energy functional $\phi$ on the space of knots, which blows up when the knot gets very close to acquiring a self-intersection (i.e. when the radius gets small.)  You might think of $\phi$ as measuring “distance from the boundary of moduli space.”  You might even hope that $\phi$ would be some kind of Morse function on the components of the space of knots!  Indeed, Hatcher expresses a desire for exactly such a function, which would provide a retract of the infinite-dimensional space of knots of a given isotopy type to some finite-dimensional submanifold of minimal energy whose topology we could hope to understand.  At least in some simple cases, Buck’s energy seems to behave like such a function; he showed us magnificent movies of a crimped, tangled knot flowing along the energy gradient to a handsome, easy to grasp, maximal-radius representative of its isotopy class.  Great!

## Pseudo-Anosov puzzle 2: homology rank and dilatation

In fact, following on what I wrote about the two Farb-Leininger-Margalit theorems below, one might ask the following.  Is there an absolute constant c such that, if f is a pseudo-Anosov mapping class on a genus g surface, and the f-invariant subspace of H_1(S) has dimension at least d, then

log λ(f) >= c (d+1)  / g?

This would “interpolate” between Penner’s theorem (the case d=0) and the F-L-M theorem about Torelli (the case d=2g).

## Pseudo-Anosovs with low dilatation: Farb-Leininger-Margalit, and a puzzle

I spent a very enjoyable weekend learning about the dilatation of pseudo-Anosov mapping classes at a workshop organized by Jean-Luc Thiffeault and myself.  The fact that a number theorist and a fluid dynamicist would organize a workshop about an area in low-dimensional topology should indicate, I hope, that the topic is of broad interest!

There are lots of ways to define dilatation, which is a kind of measure of “complexity” of a mapping class.  Here’s the simplest.  Let f be a diffeomorphism from a genus-g Riemann surface S to itself, which is pseudo-Anosov.  Loosely speaking, this means the dynamics of  f are “irreducible” on the surface; for instance, no power of f acts trivially on any subsurface.  (“Most” diffeomorphisms, in any reasonable sense, are pA.)  For any two curves a,b on S, let i(a,b) be the minimal number of intersection points between a and any curve isotopic to b.  (Note that this is typically a lot bigger than the intersection of the homology classes of a and b; the latter measures the number of intersection points counted with sign, which doesn’t change when you isotop the curves.)  It turns out that the quantity

(1/k) log i(f^k(a),b)

approaches a limit as k grows, which strictly exceeds 1;  this limit is called λ(f), the dilatation of f.  It’s invariant under deformation of f; in other words, it depends only on the class of f in the mapping class group of S.  That this limit exists is exciting enough; better still, and indicative of lots of structure I’m passing over in silence, is that λ(f) is an algebraic integer!

(I just remembered that I gave a different description of the dilatation on the blog last year, in connection with an analogy to Galois groups.)

The subject of the conference was pseudo-Anosovs with low dilatation.  The dilatations of pAs in a given genus g are known to form a discrete subset of the interval (1,infinity); thus it makes sense to ask what the smallest dilatation in genus g is.  Lots of progress on this problem has been made in recent years; Joan Birman, Eriko Hironaka, Chia-Yen Tsai, and Ji-Young Ham all talked about results in this vein.  But for general g the answer remains unknown.

A theorem of Penner guarantees that, for any pseudo-Anosov f on a surface of genus g, we have λ(f) > c^(1/g) for some constant c.  So one might call a family f_1, f_2,…. of pAs of varying genera g_1, g_2, …  “low-dilatation” if the quantity λ(f_i)^g_i is bounded.  (One such family, constructed by Hironaka and Eiko Kin, appeared in many of the lectures.)

In this connection, let me advertise the extremely satisfying theorem of Benson Farb, Chris Leininger, and Dan Margalit.  Here’s a natural construction you can do with a pA diffeomorphism f on a surface S.  The diffeo has an invariant foliation which is stretched by f; this foliation has a finite set of singularities.  Remove this to get a punctured surface S^0.  Since the singularities are preserved setwise by f, we have that f restricts to a diffeomorphism of S^0, which is again pA, and which we again call f.  Now we can make a 3-manifold M^0_f by starting with S^0 x [0,1] and gluing S^0  x 0 to S^0 x 1 via f.  By a theorem of Thurston, this will be a hyperbolic 3-manifold; because of the punctures, it’s not compact, but its ends are shaped like tori.

Now here’s the theorem:  suppose f_1, f_2, … is a sequence of pAs which has low dilatation in the sense above.  Then the sequence of 3-manifolds M^0_{f_i} actually consists of only finitely many distinct hyperbolic 3-manifolds.

This has all kinds of marvelous consequences; it tells us that the low-dilatation pAs are in some sense “all alike.”  (For more on the “in some sense” I would need to talk about the Thurston norm and fibered faces and etc. — maybe another post.)  For instance, it immediately implies that in a low-dilatation family of pseudos, the dimension of the subspace of H_1(S_i) fixed by f_i is bounded.

If you’ve read this far, maybe you’d like to see the promised puzzle.  Here it is.  Suppose f_1, f_2, … is a family of pseudos which lie in the Torelli group — that is, f_i acts trivially on H_1(S_i).  Then by the above remark this family can’t be low-dilatation.  Indeed, an earlier theorem of Farb, Leininger, and Margalit tells us that for Torellis we have an absolute lower bound

λ(f) > c

where the constant doesn’t depend on g.

Puzzle: Suppose f_1, f_2, … is a sequence of pseudos in Torelli which has bounded dilatation; this is as strong a notion of “low-dilatation family” as one can ask for.  Is there a “structure theorem” for f_1, f_2, …. as in the general case?  I.E., is there any “closed-form description” of this family?

## McMullen on dilatation in finite covers

Last year I blogged about a nice paper of Thomas Koberda, which shows that every pseudo-Anosov diffeomorphism of a Riemann surface X acts nontrivially on the homology of some characteristic cover of X with nilpotent Galois group.  (This statement is false with “nilpotent” replaced by “abelian.”)  The paper contains a question which Koberda ascribes to McMullen:

Is the dilatation λ(f) the supremum of the spectral radii of f on Σ’, as Σ’ ranges over finite etale covers of Σ preserved by f?

That question has now been answered by McMullen himself, in the negative, in a preprint released last month.  In fact, he shows that either λ(f) is detected on the homology of a double cover of Σ, or it is not detected by any finite cover at all!

The supremum of the spectral radius of f on the Σ’ is then an invariant of f, which most of the time is strictly bigger than the spectral radius of f on Σ and strictly smaller than λ(f).  Is this invariant interesting?  Are there any circumstances under which it can be computed?

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## Fritz Grunewald, RIP

Fritz Grunewald died unexpectedly this week, just before his 61st birthday.  I never met him but have always been an admirer of his work, and I’d been meaning to post about his lovely paper with Lubotzky, “Linear representations of the automorphism group of the free group.” I’m sorry it takes such a sad event to spur me to get around to this, but here goes.

Let F_n be the free group of rank n, and Aut(F_n) its automorphism group.  How to understand what this group is like?  A natural approach is to study its representation theory.  But it’s actually not so easy to get a handle on representations of this group.  Aut(F_n) acts on F_n^ab = Z^n, so you get one n-dimensional representation; but what else can you find?

The insight of Grunewald and Lubotzky is to consider the action of Aut(F_n) on the homology of interesting finite-index subgroups of F_n.  Here’s a simple example:  let R be the kernel of a surjection F_n -> Z/2Z.  Then R^ab is a free Z-module of rank 2n – 1, and the -1 eigenspace of R^ab has rank n-1.  Now F_n may not act on R, but some finite-index subgroup H of F_n does (because there are only finitely many homomorphisms F_n -> Z/2Z, and we can take H to be the stabilizer of the one in question.)  So H acquires an action on R^ab; in particular, there is a homomorphism from H to GL_{n-1}(Z).  Grunewald and Lubotzky show that this homomorphism has image of finite index in GL_{n-1}(Z).  In particular, when n = 3, this shows that a finite-index subgroup of Aut(F_3) surjects onto a finite-index subgroup of GL_2(Z).  Thus Aut(F_3) is “large” (it virtually surjects onto a non-abelian free group), and in particular it does not have property T.  Whether Aut(F_n) has property T for n>3 is still, as far as I know, unknown.

Grunewald and Lubotzky construct maps from Aut(F_n) to various arithmetic groups via “Prym constructions” like the one above (with Z/2Z replaced by an arbitrary finite group G), and prove under relatively mild conditions that these maps have image of finite index in some specified arithmetic lattice.  Of course, it is natural to ask what one can learn from this method about interesting subgroups of Aut(F_n), like the mapping class groups of punctured surfaces.  The authors indicate in the introduction that they will return to the question of representations of mapping class groups in a subsequent paper.  I very much hope that Lubotzky and others will continue the story that Prof. Grunewald helped to begin.

## Distinguished lectures this week: Gunnar Carlsson on persistent homology

Fun week coming up:  Gunnar Carlsson of Stanford will be giving this semester’s Distinguished Lecture Series at Wisconsin.  The talks:

Monday, March 8 and Tuesday, March 9, 4pm, Van Vleck B239:

“Topology and Data”

There is a growing need for mathematical methodologies which can provide understanding of high dimensional data sets. These methods also need certain kinds of robustness, so that they should not be too sensitive to changes of scale and to noise, and they should be applicable to various kinds of unstructured data. In these talks we will discuss methods for adapting idealized notions coming from algebraic topology and homotopy theory to the world of point clouds, and show numerous examples of applications of these methods.

Wednesday, March 10, 1:30pm, 1209 Engineering Hall:

“Functoriality, Generalized Persistence, And Structural Signatures”

See the computational topology at Stanford home page for a good overview of the topics of Gunnar’s lectures.  Nigel Boston, Rob Nowak, and I have been running a learning seminar on the topic:  I’ll try to post again this week about some data that Laura Balzano and I messed around with with persistent homology in mind, and what we learned thereby.

## Square pegs, square pegs. Square, square pegs.

Lately I’ve been thinking again about the “square pegs” problem:  proving that any simple closed plane curve has an inscribed square.  (I’ve blogged about this before: here, here, here, here, here.)  This post is just to collect some recent links that are relevant to the problem, some of which contain new results.

Jason Cantarella has a page on the problem with lots of nice pictures of inscribed squares, like the one at the bottom of this post.

Igor Pak wrote a preprint giving two elegant proofs that every simple closed piecewise-linear curve in the plane has an inscribed square.  What’s more, Igor tells me about a nice generalized conjecture:  if Q is a quadrilateral with a circumscribed circle, then every smooth simple closed plane curve has an inscribed quadrilateral similar to Q.  Apparently this is not always true for piecewise-linear curves!

I had a nice generalization of this problem in mind, which has the advantage of being invariant under the whole group of affine-linear transformations and not just the affine-orthogonal ones:  show that every simple closed plane curve has an inscribed hexagon which is an affine-linear transform of a regular hexagon.  This is carried out for smooth curves in a November 2008 preprint of Vrecica and Zivaljevic.  What’s more, the conjecture apparently dates back to 1972 and is due to Branko Grunbaum.  I wonder whether Pak’s methods supply a nice proof in the piecewise linear case.

## Homological stability for Hurwitz spaces and the Cohen-Lenstra conjecture over function fields

Now I’ll say a little bit about the actual problem treated by the new paper with Venkatesh and Westerland.  It’s very satisfying to have an actual theorem of this kind:  for years now we’ve been going around saying “it seems like asymptotic conjectures in analytic number theory should have a geometric reflection as theorems about stable cohomology of moduli spaces,” but for quite a while it was unclear we’d ever be able to prove something on the geometric side.

The new paper starts with the question: what do ideal class groups of number fields tend to look like?

That’s a bit vague, so let’s pin it down:  if you write down the ideal class group of the quadratic imaginary number fields $\mathbf{Q}(\sqrt{-d})$, as d ranges over squarefree integers in [0..X],  you get a list of about $\zeta(2)^{-1} X$ finite abelian groups.

The ideal class group is the one of the most basic objects of algebraic number theory; but we don’t know much about this list of groups!  Their orders are more or less under control, thanks to the analytic class number formula.  But their structure is really mysterious.

## The braid group, analytic number theory, and Weil’s three columns

This post is about a new paper of mine with Akshay Venkatesh and Craig Westerland; but I’m not going to mention that paper in the post. Instead, I want to explain why topological theorems about the stable homology of moduli spaces are relevant to analytic number theory.  If you’ve seen me give a talk about this stuff, you’ve probably heard this spiel before.

$\frac{6}{\pi^2}X + O(X^{1/2}) = \zeta(2)^{-1} X + O(X^{1/2}).$