## Seminars and Colloquia by Series

Monday, September 18, 2017 - 13:50 , Location: Skiles 006 , Michael Landry , Yale , , Organizer: Balazs Strenner
Monday, April 24, 2017 - 14:05 , Location: TBA , TBA , TBA , Organizer: Caitlin Leverson
Monday, April 17, 2017 - 14:05 , Location: Skiles 006 , Chaohui Zhang , Morehouse College , Organizer: Dan Margalit
Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - 14:05 , Location: Skiles 006 , Jean Gutt , UGA , Organizer: Caitlin Leverson
Monday, April 10, 2017 - 14:00 , Location: Skiles 006 , Peter Lambert-Cole , Indiana University , Organizer: John Etnyre
A foundational result in the study of contact geometry and Legendrian knots is Eliashberg and Fraser's classification of Legendrian unknots They showed that two homotopy-theoretic invariants - the Thurston-Bennequin number and rotation number - completely determine a Legendrian unknot up to isotopy. Legendrian spatial graphs are a natural generalization of Legendrian knots.  We prove an analogous result for planar Legendrian graphs. Using convex surface theory, we prove that the rotation invariant and Legendrian ribbon are a complete set of invariants for planar Legendrian graphs. We apply this result to completely classify planar Legendrian embeddings of the Theta graph. Surprisingly, this classification shows that Legendrian graphs violate some proven and conjectured properties of Legendrian knots. This is joint work with Danielle O'Donnol.​​
Monday, April 3, 2017 - 15:30 , Location: Skiles 006 , Jo Nelson , Barnard College, Columbia University , Organizer: Caitlin Leverson
I will discuss joint work with Hutchings which gives a rigorousconstruction of cylindrical contact homology via geometric methods. Thistalk will highlight our use of non-equivariant constructions, automatictransversality, and obstruction bundle gluing. Together these yield anonequivariant homological contact invariant which is expected to beisomorphic to SH^+ under suitable assumptions. By making use of familyFloer theory we obtain an S^1-equivariant theory defined with coefficientsin Z, which when tensored with Q recovers the classical cylindrical contacthomology, now with the guarantee of well-definedness and invariance. Thisintegral lift of contact homology also contains interesting torsioninformation.
Monday, April 3, 2017 - 14:00 , Location: Skiles 006 , Josh Greene , Boston College , Organizer: John Etnyre
I will describe a diagrammatic classification of (1,1) knots in S^3 and lens spaces that admit non-trivial L-space surgeries. A corollary of the classification is that 1-bridge braids in these manifolds admit non-trivial L-space surgeries. This is joint work with Sam Lewallen and Faramarz Vafaee.
Monday, March 27, 2017 - 14:00 , Location: Skiles 006 , Roger Casals , MIT , Organizer: John Etnyre
In this talk we associate a combinatorial dg-algebra to a cubic planar graph. This algebra is defined by counting binary sequences, which we introduce, and we shall provide explicit computations. From there, we study the Legendrian surfaces behind these combinatorial constructions, including Legendrian surgeries and the count of Morse flow trees, and discuss the proof of the correspondence between augmentations and constructible sheaves for this class of Legendrians.
Monday, March 20, 2017 - 14:05 , Location: Skiles 006 , None , None , Organizer: Jennifer Hom
Monday, March 13, 2017 - 15:30 , Location: Skiles 006 , David Gay , UGA , Organizer: Caitlin Leverson
This is joint work with Jeff Meier. The Gluck twist operation removes an S^2XB^2 neighborhood of a knotted S^2 in S^4 and glues it back with a twist, producing a homotopy S^4 (i.e. potential counterexamples to the smooth Poincare conjecture, although for many classes of 2-knots theresults are in fact known to be smooth S^4's). By representing knotted S^2's in S^4 as doubly pointed Heegaard triples and understanding relative trisection diagrams of S^2XB^2 carefully, I'll show how to produce trisection diagrams (a.k.a. Heegaard triples) for these homotopy S^4's.(And for those not up on trisections I'll review the foundations.) The resulting recipe is surprisingly simple, but the fun, as always, is in the process.