Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Thompson links are links arising from elements of the Thompson group. They were introduced by Vaughan Jones as part of his effort to construct a conformal field theory for every finite index subfactor. In this talk I will first talk about Jones' construction of Thompson links. Then I will talk about grid diagrams and introduce a notion of half grid diagrams to give an equivalent construction of Thompson links and further associate with each Thompson link a canonical Legendrian type. Lastly, I will talk about some applications about the maximal Thurston-Bennequin number and presentation of link group. This is joint work with Yangxiao Luo.