This paper is a survey on the Lickorish type construction of some kind of closed manifolds over simple convex polytopes. Inspired by Lickorish's theorem, we propose a method to describe certain families of manifolds over simple convex polytopes with torus action. Under this construction, many classical classification results of these families of manifolds could be interpreted by this construction and some further problems will be discussed.
What is Lickorish type construction?This paper is a survey on the Lickorish type construction of some kind of closed manifolds over simple convex polytopes. We first explain what is "Lickorish type construction".In algebra, it is natural to describe algebraic systems, such as rings and algebras, by generators and relations. In geometry and topology, it is often convenient to construct spaces from some very special examples by certain type of operations. We write this construction in terms of algebraic system by AS generators | some operations , where AS is the abbreviation for "algebraic system". One typical example is the following theorem obtained by Lickorish in 1962.Theorem 1.1 (Lickorish [8]). Any orientable closed connected 3-manifold can be obtained from S 3 by a finite number of Dehn surgeries on knots.This theorem provides a global viewpoint of the construction of orientable closed connected 3-manifolds under algebraic system with generators and operations. We call this kind of construction or description Lickorish type construction. Under this point of view, we can rewrite the above theorem as:All orientable closed connected 3-manifolds = AS S 3 | Dehn surgeries on knots .