Effective finiteness of irreducible Heegaard splittings of non-Haken 3-manifolds (Q1626582)

``The long-standing classification problem in the theory of Heegaard splittings of 3-manifolds is to exhibit for each closed 3-manifold a complete list, without duplications, of all its irreducible Heegaard splittings, up to isotopy''. The case of Haken 3-manifolds has been considered by \textit{K. Johannson} [Topology and combinatorics of 3-manifolds. Berlin: Springer-Verlag (1995; Zbl 0820.57001)]: up to Dehn twists along embedded tori, a closed Haken 3-manifold has only finitely many, effectively constructible isotopy classes of Heegaard surfaces of genus \(g\), for each \(g\). For the case of a non-Haken 3-manifold, \textit{T. Li} showed [Geom. Topol. 15, No. 2, 1029--1106 (2011; Zbl 1221.57034)] how to construct for each \(g\) a finite list of genus-\(g\) Heegaard surfaces which contains every genus-\(g\) Heegaard surface, up to isotopy. ``The main result of the present paper is a short effective proof of Tao Li's theorem that a closed non-Haken hyperbolic 3-manifold has at most finitely many irreducible Heegaard splittings''. ``This effective result, together with a sequel [the authors with \textit{D. Ketover}, Duke Math. J. 167, No. 15, 2833--2856 (2018; Zbl 1403.57013)], solves the classification problem for Heegaard splittings of non-Haken hyperbolic 3-manifolds''. (Concerning effective computability, the authors note that ``there are two places that we are aware of in Tao Li's work that are not effective, in that each requires a compactness argument''.) Specifically, the main result of the present paper is the following. If \(N\) is a closed non-Haken hyperbolic 3-manifold, then there exists an effectively computable constant \(C(N)\) such that every irreducible Heegaard splitting of \(N\) has genus bounded above by \(C(N)\); in particular, one can produce a finite list of Heegaard splittings which contains all irreducible Heegaard splittings of \(N\), up to isotopy. In the sequel to the present paper mentioned above, an ``effective algorithm'' is given that eliminates all duplications and reducible Heegaard splittings from this list, so this gives the solution to the classification problem of Heegaard splittings for the case of non-Haken hyperbolic 3-manifolds.