Flipping Heegaard splittings

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Daniel Ketover, Rutgers University

In-Person Talk

In the 1930s, Reidemeister and Singer showed that any two Heegaard surfaces in a three-manifold become isotopic after adding enough trivial handles. I will show how this topological result gives rise to minimal surfaces of Morse index 2 in many ambient geometries.  As an application, I’ll show that the number of genus g minimal surfaces in the round sphere tends to infinity as g does