Heegaard splittings and Morse-Smale flows

We describe three theorems which summarize what survives in three dimensions of Smale's proof of the higher-dimensional Poincaré conjecture. The proofs require Smale's cancellation lemma and a lemma asserting the existence of a 2-gon. Such 2-gons are the analogues in dimension two of Whitn...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Ralf Gautschi, Joel W. Robbin, Dietmar A. Salamon
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Wiley 2003-01-01
Series:International Journal of Mathematics and Mathematical Sciences
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/S0161171203210115
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:We describe three theorems which summarize what survives in three dimensions of Smale's proof of the higher-dimensional Poincaré conjecture. The proofs require Smale's cancellation lemma and a lemma asserting the existence of a 2-gon. Such 2-gons are the analogues in dimension two of Whitney disks in higher dimensions. They are also embedded lunes; an (immersed) lune is an index-one connecting orbit in the Lagrangian Floer homology determined by two embedded loops in a 2-manifold.
ISSN:0161-1712
1687-0425