Generalized plumbings and Murasugi sums (Q258980)

The authors consider a generalization of the notions of plumbing and Murasagi sum to the case of smooth manifolds in arbitrary dimension. They show that a generalized version of Stallings' result on the summing of open books extends to this context. Specifically the sum of the pages of two open books is again a page of an open book. The paper gives a comprehensive survey of the foundations of both plumbing and Murasagi sums. There are many helpful diagrams that serve to illuminate the geometrical methods used in the proofs.