Limits Of Incompressible Surfaces

Abstract

One can embed arbitrarily many disjoint, non-parallel, non-boundary parallel, incompressible surfaces in any three manifold with at least one boundary component of genus two or greater [4]. This paper proves the contrasting, but not contradictory result that although one can sometimes embed arbitrarily many surfaces in a 3-manifold it is impossible to ever embed an infinite number of such surfaces in any compact, orientable 3-manifold M.

8 pages, Latex, psfig, to be published in Topology and Its Applications