Geometry of the mapping class groups I: Boundary amenability

This paper uses the renowned Kechris-Pestov-Todor\v{c}evi\'{c} machinery to show that (big) mapping class groups are not extremely amenable unless the underlying surface is a sphere or a once-punctured sphere, or equivalently when the mapping class group is trivial. The same techniques also show that the pure mapping class groups, as well as compactly supported mapping class groups, of a surface with genus at least one can never be extremely amenable.

We give a finite presentation of the mapping class group of an oriented (possibly bounded) surface of genus greater or equal than 1, considering Dehn twists on a very simple set of curves.

Finite presentations for the mapping class group M(F) are known for arbitrary orientable compact surface F. If F is non-orientable, then such presentations are known only when F has genus at most 3 and few boundary components. In this paper we obtain finite presentation for the mapping class group of the closed non-orientable surface of genus 4 from its action on the so called ordered complex of curves.

We show that every auto-homeomorphism of the unmeasured lamination space of an orientable surface of finite type is induced by a unique extended mapping class unless the surface is a sphere with at most four punctures or a torus with at most two punctures or a closed surface of genus 2.

We prove that for any orientable connected surface of finite type which is not a a sphere with at most four punctures or a torus with at most two punctures, any homeomorphism of the space of geodesic laminations of this surface, equipped with the Thurston topology, is induced by a homeomorphism of the surface.

We introduce a natural stratification of the space of projective classes of measured laminations on a complete hyperbolic surface of finite area. We prove a rigidity result, namely, the group of self-homeomorphisms of the space of projective measured laminations that preserve such a stratification is in general identified with the extended mapping class group of the corresponding surface. We use this approach to fill a gap in the proof of the rigidity of the action of the ext...

We provide some language for algebraic study of the mapping class groups for surfaces with non-connected boundary. As applications, we generalize our previous results on Dehn twists to any compact connected oriented surfaces with non-empty boundary. Moreover we embed the `smallest' Torelli group in the sense of Putman into a pro-nilpotent group coming from the Goldman Lie algebra. The graded quotients of the embedding equal the Johnson homomorphisms of all degrees if the boun...

We show that the pure mapping class group is uniformly perfect for a certain class of infinite type surfaces with noncompact boundary components. We then combine this result with recent work in the remaining cases to give a complete classification of the perfect and uniformly perfect pure mapping class groups for infinite type surfaces. We also develop a method to cut a general surface into simpler surfaces and extend some mapping class group results to the general case.

We give a bound for the geometric dimension for the family of virtually cyclic groups in mapping class groups of a compact surface with punctures, possibly with nonempty boundary and negative Euler characteristic.

In this paper, we survey recent works on the structure of the mapping class groups of surfaces mainly from the point of view of topology. We then discuss several possible directions for future research. These include the relation between the structure of the mapping class group and invariants of 3-manifolds, the unstable cohomology of the moduli space of curves and Faber's conjecture, cokernel of the Johnson homomorphisms and the Galois as well as other new obstructions, coho...