William Thurston conjectured over twenty years ago that every compact hyperbolic 3manifold whose boundary is a possibly empty union of tori is finitely covered by a manifold which fibres over the circle. If true, it provides a significant amount of global information about the topology of such manifolds. The first non-trivial examples supporting the conjecture were obtained by Gabai [Ga1] (1986...

Every element in the first cohomology group of a 3–manifold is dual to embedded surfaces. The Thurston norm measures the minimal ‘complexity’ of such surfaces. For instance the Thurston norm of a knot complement determines the genus of the knot in the 3–sphere. We show that the degrees of twisted Alexander polynomials give lower bounds on the Thurston norm, generalizing work of McMullen and Tur...

Natural hazards are among destructive agents that annually take thousands of lives and impose devastating damages in Iran. Spotting such a high risk areas can help reducing the amount of their probable risk. A 1:500000 liquefaction and landslide hazard zonation map developed for the southern shoreline of the Caspian Sea. This geotechnical hazard map divides the study area to 15 hazard classes (...