Celebratio Mathematica — Freedman

Conversation with Bob Edwards on Mike Freedman’s Fields Medal work

Works connected to Peter Teichner

Filter the Bibliography List

year	title	people

			clear

article M. H. Freedman and P. Teichner: “4-manifold topology I: Subexponential groups,” Invent. Math. 122 : 3 (1995), pp. 509–529. MR 1359602 Zbl 0857.57017

The technical lemma underlying the 5-dimensional topological \( s \)-cobordism conjecture and the 4-dimensional topological surgery conjecture is a purely smooth category statement about locating \( \pi_1 \)-null immersions of disks. These conjectures are theorems precisely for those fundamental groups (“good groups”) where the \( \pi_1 \)-null disk lemma (NDL) holds. We expand the class of known good groups to all groups of subexponential growth and those that can be formed from these by a finite number of application of two operations: (1) extension and (2) direct limit. The finitely generated groups in thisclass are amenable and no amenable group is known to lie outside this class.