Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

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.​​