On the Heegaard genus of contact 3-manifolds

Abstract

It is well-known that the Heegaard genus is additive under connected sum of 3-manifolds. We show that the Heegaard genus of contact 3-manifolds is not necessarily additive under contact connected sum. We also prove some basic properties of the contact genus (a.k.a. open book genus [Rubinstein J.H., Comparing open book and Heegaard decompositions of 3-manifolds, Turkish J. Math., 2003, 27(1), 189–196]) of 3-manifolds, and compute this invariant for some 3-manifolds.