Most unexposed taut one-relator presentation 2-complexes are finitely unsplittable

Publication date 15 July 2019

Abstract: The main result of this article is that among the family of one-relator presentation 2-complexes that might be expected to be finitely unsplittable (not the union of two proper subpolyhedra with finite first homology groups) almost all have this property. Included among these one-relator presentation 2-complexes are all generalized dunce hats. A generalized dunce hat is a 2-dimensional polyhedron created by attaching the boundary of a disk

D e l t a

to a circle

J

via a map

f : p a r t i a l D e l t a i g h t a r r o w J

with the property that there is a point

v

in

J

such that

f^{- 1} (v)

is a finite set containing at least 3 points and

f

maps each component of

p a r t i a l D e l t a - f^{- 1} (v)

homeomorphically onto

J - v

. The fact that generalized dunce hats are finitely unsplittable undermines a strategy for proving that the interior of the Mazur compact contractible 4-manifold

M

is splittable in the sense of Gabai (i.e.,

e x t i n t (M) = U c u p V

where

U

,

V

and

U c a p V

are each homeomorphic to Euclidean 4-space).

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