Senior Honors Thesis Presentation: Group Actions and Taut Foliations

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Senior Honors Thesis Presentation: Group Actions and Taut Foliations

Speaker: Gabrielle Abato, Washington University in St. Louis

Abstract: Taut foliations and geometric structures are useful in understanding 3-manifolds. In particular, if a 3-manifold contains a taut foliation then its fundamental group acts nontrivially on a simply  connected 1- manifold. In this paper we investigate whether the converse is also true as well as discuss some background on group actions and on 3-manifolds. We also discuss an interesting test case.

Advisor: Rachel Roberts