Heegaard Splittings and Complexity of Fibered Knots

Abstract

This dissertation explores a relationship between fibered knots and Heegaard splittings in closed, connected, orientable three-manifolds. We show that a fibered knot, which has a sufficiently complicated monodromy, induces a minimal genus Heegaard splitting that is unique up to isotopy. Moreover, we show that fibered knots in the three-sphere has complexity at most 3.