Revenge mathematics

Revenge mathematics. I think that it was 1977, I visited England for a conference. There are some memories, but I may be mixing up with another conference. May be it was the conference Serre lectured and lights went out but he went on with the lecture. I was going back to india but stopped to visit a friend Jo Marks in Southampton. On the way, I stopped in London to visit Dillon’s, a bookshop which had a reasonable collection of mathematics books. Just then a book on 3-manifolds came out and I bought. As I browsed the book, there were no references to me though there were references to others who did similar work. I was upset and angry. On the train to Southampton, I started looking at open problems in the book( I think that I ended up solving some of them) and one caught my attention. It was about finding criteria for a surface subgroup of a compact irreducible manifold to be peripheral. I found a cohomological criterion for sufficiency and by the time I landed in Southampton, I had a theorem ready. But it was too easy and I was not sure whether it was publishable. Somedays later I realised that it was an important special case of a theorem of Johannson and he actually ave me preprints in 1974 in Bielefeld. and I happily published a two page note. It brought some attention but I could not prove the full Johannson theorem. It seemed to need a relative version of what I did. Much later I started working with Peter Scott and had a joint paper with Peter which was mostly his. He asked me to prove the relative version and it came immediately. Instead of some coholomogy group being zero, it needed a map in some cohomological groups to be the zero map. Peter completed the proof of Johannson’s theorem using some easy three dimensional topology. This was around 2000. I thought that was the end of it. Meanwhile we studied this kind of decompositions of Poincare Duality pairs and around 2019, we started wondering whether an analogue of Johannsion’s theorem was true for them. And in a few days a proof popped up. And it also gave a simple algebraic proof for 3-manifolds. Meanwhile fashion shifted and nobody noticed it though for us it was a pleasing conclusion after nearly 42 years. But I think that I have seen micro bundles, block bundles and various such fashions come and go but JSJ stayed for fifty years. P.S. I tried a relative version of my argument for over twenty years but could not do it. Yet when Peter asked me do it, I did with in a day. May be there is some thing in collaboration that increases the intensity of the endeavour and makes two plus two bigger than four. ...... The link below is the third of the papers. The first two papers are the references 20 and 16 there. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.15684.pdf