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A foliated disk whose boundary is Morton's irreducible 4-braid

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2000

GRETCHEN WRIGHT
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Bronx Community College of the City University of New York, Bronx, NY 10453, U.S.A.

Abstract

From the viewpoint of Birman and Menasco, a particular type of singular foliation on a surface with boundary induces an embedding of the surface in 3-space, such that the boundary of the surface is braided relative to the z-axis; hence the foliation determines a conjugacy class in the braid group. Birman and Hirsch describe an explicit algorithm to find a braid word representing this conjugacy class, given the foliation. A braid word β ∈ Bn is said to be irreducible if it is not conjugate to a braid of the form bσ±1n−1, with bBn−1. We exhibit a foliation of a disk and show that the corresponding braid word is an irreducible element of B4. We give an explicit geometric description of the embedding induced by the foliation and describe a particularly nice form of symmetry possessed by this example.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
The Cambridge Philosophical Society 2000

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