Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

We will talk a little about realizing automorphisms of a free group as graph maps and how to use Stallings folds to study them.

How good of an invariant is the Jones polynomial? The question is closely tied to studying braid group representations since the Jones polynomial can be defined as a (normalized) trace of a braid group representation.

Let M be the 3-manifold obtained by r-surgery on the right handed trefoil knot. Classification of contact structures on such manifolds have been mostly understood for r \geq 1 and r=0. Etnyre-Min-Tosun has an upcoming work on the classification of the tight contact structures for all r. The fillability of contact structures on M is mostly understood if r is not between 0 and 1/2. In this talk, we will discuss the fillability of the contact structures M for 0

Abstract: How big is a group?  One possible notion of the size of the group is the cohomological dimension, which is the largest n for which a group G can have non—trivial cohomology in degree n, possibly with twisted coefficients.  Following the work of Bestvina, Bux and Margalit, we compute the cohomological dimension of the terms Johnson filtration of a closed surface.  No background is required for this talk.

I'll talk about some 2D billiards, the most visual class of dynamical systems, where orbits (rays) move along straight lines within a billiard table with elastic reflections off the boundary.  Elliptic flowers are built “around" convex polygons, and the boundary of corresponding billiard tables consists of the arcs of ellipses.

One of the most interesting and surprising features of manifold topology is the existence of topological 4-manifold that admit infinitely many smooth structures. In these talks I will discuss what is known about these “exotic” smooth structures on open manifolds, starting with R^4 and then moving on to other open 4-manifolds. We will also go over various constructions and open questions about these manifolds.  

One of the most interesting and surprising features of manifold topology is the existence of topological 4-manifold that admit infinitely many smooth structures. In these talks I will discuss what is known about these “exotic” smooth structures on open manifolds, starting with R^4 and then moving on to other open 4-manifolds. We will also go over various constructions and open questions about these manifolds.  

There exist many different diagrammatic descriptions of 4-manifolds, with the usual claim that "such and such a diagram uniquely determines a smooth 4-manifold up to diffeomorphism". This raises higher order questions: Up to what diffeomorphism? If the same diagram is used to produce two different 4-manifolds, is there a diffeomorphism between them uniquely determined up to isotopy? Are such isotopies uniquely determined up to isotopies of isotopies?