Triangulations of fibre-free Haken 3-manifolds (Q816339)

Any triangulation of a compact \(PL\) \(n\)-manifold can be transformed into any other triangulation of the same manifold by a finite sequence of simplicial moves, the so called Pachner moves; nevertheless, it is not known whether there exists a computable function bounding the number of moves needed to connect any two triangulations of the same 3-manifold. The main theorem of this paper (Theorem 3.1) gives an explicit bound of this kind for fiber-free Haken 3-manifolds, in terms of the number of tetrahedra in the two triangulations. The main idea for the proof is to consider triangulations of a Haken manifold which interact well with the pieces of its Jaco-Shalen-Johannson decomposition. As a consequence, Theorem 3.1 produces a conceptually trivial algorithm for determining whether any 3-manifold is homeomorphic to the complement of a given nonfibred knot in the 3-sphere.