Heegaard surfaces and measured laminations, II: non-Haken 3-manifolds

Abstract

A famous example of Casson and Gordon shows that a Haken 3-manifold can have an infinite family of irreducible Heegaard splittings with different genera. In this paper, we prove that a closed non-Haken 3-manifold has only finitely many irreducible Heegaard splittings, up to isotopy. This is much stronger than the Waldhausen conjecture. Another immediate corollary is that for any irreducible non-Haken 3-manifold M, there is a number N, such that any two Heegaard splittings of M are equivalent after at most N stabilizations.