Open book decompositions—known in various contexts as global Poincaré–Birkhoff sections, relative mapping tori, Milnor fibrations, fibered links, and spinnable structures—have arisen independently across several areas of mathematics. Introduced by Thurston and Winkelnkemper, they became a central tool in 3-dimensional contact topology through the groundbreaking work of Giroux, who established a one-to-one correspondence between contact structures up to isotopy and open book decompositions up to positive stabilization.
The strength of this correspondence lies in its combinatorial nature: an open book is determined by a mapping class group element of a surface with boundary, which in turn can be expressed in terms of Dehn twists along simple closed curves. As a result, problems in contact topology can be translated into combinatorial questions about curves on surfaces. This perspective enables explicit computations and offers a powerful framework for proving structural results.
In this talk, I will sketch a proof of the Giroux correspondence using the interplay between open book decompositions and Heegaard splittings. This is joint work with Joan Licata.
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