Foliations and genera of links (Q1059903)

The paper belongs to a series of papers by the author in which a new technique is introduced to three-dimensional topology. For a general announcement of the author's results, see his note in Bull. Am. Math. Soc., New Ser. 8, 77-80 (1983; Zbl 0539.54018) and for another application of this technique, see his paper in J. Differ. Geom. 18, 445- 503 (1983; Zbl 0533.57013). The main ingredient of this technique is a geometric construction of foliations on 3-manifolds. In many cases this construction can be successfully applied simply by hand. Indeed, one of the main theorems reduces the construction of a foliation to the finding of a much simpler geometric object, introduced by the author and called the disc decomposition. The resulting foliations have several pleasant geometric properties. The one of special importance is the absence of Reeb components. And, this is the main point, we can make a preassigned surface to be a compact leaf. Due to these properties, a theorem proved by Thurston in his unpublished preprint ''A norm on the homology of 3-manifolds'' can be applied to these foliations. In the situation of the reviewed paper, this theorem implies that some Seifert surfaces spanning links in \(S^ 3\) are of minimal genus (among all Seifert surfaces).In this way the genus of all oriented alternating links, all oriented links with \(\leq 9\) crossings, all knots with \(\leq 10\) crossing, all classical pretzel knots can be calculated. As another application of his technique, the author proves that longitudinal surgery on many knots yields irreducible 3-manifolds.