3-manifolds with irreducible Heegaard splittings of high genus (Q1972338)

The authors prove that a large class of 3-manifolds obtained by Dehn surgery on knots admit non-isotopic Heegaard splittings of non-minimal genus. They generalize vertical and horizontal Heegaard splittings for some non-necessary Seifert fibered spaces, and they introduce the notion of Heegaard splitting of a pair \((M,K)\) where \(K\) is a knot in a general 3-manifold \(M\). They give a very useful tool which is a combinatorial object that they call a treillis. The notion of treillis generalizes the \(2n\)-plat, and gives a presentation of knots (or links) in terms of a family of integer parameters.