Combinatorial methods in Dehn surgery

Abstract

This is an expository paper, in which we give a summary of some of the joint work of John Luecke and the author on Dehn surgery. We consider the situation where we have two Dehn fillings $M(α)$ and $M(β)$ on a given 3-manifold $M$, each containing a surface that is either essential or a Heegaard surface. We show how a combinatorial analysis of the graphs of intersection of the two corresponding punctured surfaces in $M$ enables one to find faces of these graphs which give useful topological information about $M(α)$ and $M(β)$, and hence, in certain cases, good upper bounds on the intersection number $Δ(α, β)$ of the two filling slopes.