Knots with only two strict essential surfaces

Abstract

We consider irreducible 3-manifolds M that arise as knot complements in closed 3-manifolds and that contain at most two connected strict essential surfaces. The results in the paper relate the boundary slopes of the two surfaces to their genera and numbers of boundary components. Explicit quantitative relationships, with interesting asymptotic properties, are obtained in the case that M is a knot complement in a closed manifold with cyclic fundamental group.