Graduate Session # 2 Saturday 11 : 10 - 11 : 35

Morse 2-functions and trisections of 4-manifolds (Room 1.316) Robion Kirby (University of California, Berkeley) I’ll talk about work with David Gay which extends the notion of a Morse function f : M → R to a function from a 4-manifold X to a 2-dimensional surface. Just as the former gives an existence and uniqueness theorem for Heegaard splittings of a 3-manifold M , the latter gives existence and uniqueness of a trisection for X.