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Some things that I really would like to make good drawings of

Very bad grammar in the title, sorry.

The ``things that I really would like to make good drawings of'' are unfoldings of two codimension- singularities in the stratified space of smooth functions from $\mathbb{R}^n$ to $\mathbb{R}$ . The two are the the butterfly singularity, or hyperbolic umbilic, and the elliptic umbilic, or monkey saddle. In fact, the butterfly singularity lies in the space of functions from $\mathbb{R}$ to $\mathbb{R}$ and the monkey saddle in the space of functions from $\mathbb{R}^2$ to $\mathbb{R}$ , but by adding sums of squares in the other coordinates, these give codimension- singularities for maps from $\mathbb{R}^n$ to $\mathbb{R}$ . Incidentally, the best pictures I know of in print are in Hatcher and Wagoner's ``Pseudo-isotopies of compact manifolds'', but we should be able to do better now with our increased computational power.

The butterfly singularity is, well, pretty simple: . Seems strange to give it such a special name, but this becomes more meaningful when you think about its ``universal unfolding''. This function can of course be perturbed in many different ways to make it Morse. The ``universal unfolding'' is $f_{a,b,c}(x) = x^5 + a x + b x^2 + c x^3$ . For generic values of , and this will be a Morse function, and as we move around in parameter space we see the singularities coming together and cancelling in various ways. What I want is a nice way to draw, for a given plane in -space, the immersed surface in $\mathbb{R}\times P$ defined by $(z,(a,b,c)) \in S$ if $z=f_{a,b,c}(x_0)$ for some with $f'_{a,b,c}(x_0) = 0$ . This shouldn't be too hard, right? Then I want to animate this as we move this plane through -space.

The monkey saddle is ... arggh, lost some text here when editing this post later... moral: don't edit your posts after you've written and posted them... will try to fix it later...

Proposal for a smooth 4-manifold invariant

Warning: the following is fantasy.

Given an oriented closed -manifold and an indefinite Morse -function $G \colon\thinspace X \to S^2$ , choose a (noncompact) oriented -manifold with a smooth map $\mu \colon\thinspace M \to X$ satisfying the following properties:

For any compact codimension-0 submanifold $M_0 \subset M$ , $\mu\vert _{M_0}$ is an immersion.
For every simple closed curve that is transverse to the fold locus and avoids the cusps, consider , , the map , and the -valued Morse function . We require that, for some gradient-like vector field for :
1. $\mu_C(M_C)$ contains descending disks for each of the index critical points of and ascending disks for each of the index critical points of ,
2. is tangent to $\mu_C(M_C)$ (i.e. the vector field $\mu_C^*(V)$ in the vector bundle $\mu_C^*(TX)$ actually lies in ), and
3. $\mu_C^*(V)$ is a complete vector field on , i.e. you can flow forever along it and never run off the ``end'' of .
For every simple closed curve as above, there is an annulus neighborhood $[-\epsilon,\epsilon] \times C$ embedded in over which looks like $(t,p) \mapsto (t,g_C(p))$ (i.e. a constant homotopy of Morse functions), and such that over each $\{t\} \times C$ , is as described above for a smoothly varying gradient-like vector field which has the genericity properties we expect from Cerf theory: transversely intersecting ascending and descending manifolds except at isolated handle slides.
We don't care what does over the cusps - in fact the above conditions probably guarantee that can't hit the cusps at all, but that's fine. (We might need to add the condition that there aren't infinitely many handle slides as you move in towards a cusp?)

Now given this data, a $\mu$ -multisection is a smoothly embedded surface $\Sigma \subset X$ with $\partial \Sigma = Z$ (where is the fold set in ), such that in fact $\Sigma$ lies entirely in the double point set for $\mu$ , and such that $G\vert _{\Sigma} \colon\thinspace \Sigma \to S^2$ is a ``boundary-branched cover''; i.e. branching happens on the boundary.

There is something to be figured out here about orientations on and $\Sigma$ that should assign a sign to each such $\Sigma$

Then here is the invariant: For each spin $^\mathbb{C}$ structure on , consider the associated homology class $A_s \in H_2(X,Z)$ , where is the fold set, as in Perutz. Count up the $\mu$ -multisections representing , with signs, and the total number is an invariant.

What needs to be done?

Prove such an always exists.
Figure out the sign issue with $\mu$ -multisections.
Figure out what a cobordism between such 's would be, given a generic homotopy between two indefinite Morse -functions.
Show that such a cobordism would give a cobordism between the sets of $\mu$ -multisections representing a given - and somehow use this to conclude that the count is an invariant.

David Gay 2010-05-19

Symplectic polydisk and ellipsoid embeddings

Some explicit questions about polydisk and ellipsoid embeddings that Olga Buse and I hope to tackle:

Consider the map $f \colon\thinspace B^4(1) \to B^2(1)$ defined in complex coordinates by . Pick a regular value, say . Let $C = f^{-1}(z_0)$ . First of all, what is the area $A=\int_C \omega_0$ ? Secondly, given any area , let be the supremum over all such that there is a polydisk $B^2(a) \times B^2(w(a))$ embedded in with $B^2(a) \times \{0\} \subset C$ . Calculate . It should obviously be a decreasing function of . Then, for which is largest?
Same thing for any other Lefschetz fibration, or any complex polynomial for that matter.
In principle you might be able to use these same ideas to understand ellipsoid embeddings. Maybe the best way to say it is this: Given the symplectic surface $C = f^{-1}(z_0)$ , find a smooth positive function $r \colon\thinspace C \to (0,\infty)$ with a symplectic embedding of $P(C,r)=\{(p,x,y) \in C \times \mathbb{R}^2 \mid \sqrt{x^2+y^2} < r(p)\}$ into mapping $P \times \{(0,0)\}$ to by the identity. Hopefully you can find such a function and such an embedding so that it ``fully fills'' . Then by trimming back and trimming back just right, we can get embeddings of ellipsoids, and by trimming back and trimming back to be constant, we can get embeddings of polydisks.
My original idea about using Lefschetz fibrations was a little different, but should probably amount to the same thing. Take your favorite topological Lefschetz fibration of over . Build it symplectically, with convex boundary, in some standard way, starting with $F \times B^2$ (where is the fiber) and then adding very thin Weinstein handles. You end up with a symplectic structure $\omega$ on with convex boundary, with induced contact form $\alpha$ on (contact form because you have kept careful track of the form, not just the underlying contact structure, as you attached the handles). And this nonstandard symplectic ball is almost fully filled with a polydisk. Now we know that there exists some function $f \colon\thinspace S^3 \to [1,\infty)$ so that $f \alpha = k \alpha_0$ , where $\alpha_0$ is the standard contact form on $S^3 = \partial B^4(1)$ , and is some constant. I think that then you want to measure $\int_{S^3} f$ , or something like that - this should be a measure of how much volume you have to add to change $(B^4,\omega)$ into the standard round ball. Somehow this function is an interesting object attached to a word in Dehn twists.
The other idea for polydisks, which ultimately is still really the same basic idea, namely extending a symplectic surface out to a polydisk as much as possible, is to consider ribbon disks for interesting transverse ribbon knots.