Hoang Nguyen
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
PhD Graduate Student – Dissertator
“A compact, orientable, irreducible 3-manifold M with empty or toroidal boundary is called geometric if its interior admits a geometric structure in the sense of Thurston. The manifold M is called non-geometric if it is not geometric. Coarse geometry of an immersed surface in a geometric 3-manifold is relatively well-understood by previous work of Hass, Bonahon-Thurston. In this talk, I will give a complete computation to the distortion of surface groups in non-geometric 3-manifold groups. A strong connection between subgroup distortion and subgroup separability is given. I also discuss a progress in understanding the structure of the group of quasi-isometries of a closed graph manifold which is completely mysterious.”
Committee Members:
Profs. Chris Hruska (Advisor); Suzanne Boyd, Craig Guilbault, Burns Healy & Boris Okun