10:00
A major tool used to understand manifolds is understanding how different measures of complexity relate to one another. One particularly combinatorial measure of the complexity of a 3-manifold M is the minimal number of tetrahedra in a simplicial complex homeomorphic to M, called the triangulation complexity of M. A natural question is whether we can relate this with more geometric measures of the complexity of a manifold, especially understanding these relationships as combinatorial complexity grows.
In the case when the manifold fibres over the circle, a recent theorem of Marc Lackenby and Jessica Purcell gives both an upper and lower bound on the triangulation complexity in terms of a geometric invariant of the gluing map (its translation length in the triangulation graph). We will discuss this result as well as a new result concerning what happens when we alter the gluing map by a Dehn twist.