Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Cabling is one of important knot operations. We study various properties of cable knots and how to characterize the cable knots by its complement.

Bestvina--Brady groups are subgroups of right-angled Artin groups, and their Dehn functions are bounded above by quartic functions. There are examples of Bestvina--Brady groups whose Dehn functions are linear, quadratic, cubic, and quartic. In this talk, I will give a class of Bestvina--Brady groups that have polynomial Dehn functions, and we can identify the Dehn functions by the defining graphs of those Bestvina--Brady groups. 

A cobordism between 3-manifolds is ribbon if it is built from handles of index no greater than 2. Such cobordisms arise naturally from several different topological and geometric contexts. In this talk, we discuss these objects and present a few obstructions to their existence, from Thurston geometries, character varieties, and instanton and Heegaard Floer homologies. This is joint work with Aliakbar Daemi, Tye Lidman, and Mike Wong.

Poincare Conjecture, undoubtedly, is the most influential and challenging problem in the world of Geometry and Topology. Over a century, it has left it’s mark on developing the rich theory around it. In this talk I will give a brief history of the development of Topology and then I will focus on the Exotic behavior of manifolds. In the last part of the talk, I will concentrate more on the theory of 4-manifolds.

In 1925, Heisenberg introduced non-commutativity of coordinates, now known as quantization, to explain the spectral lines of atoms. In topology, finding quantizations of (symplectic or more generally Poisson) spaces can reveal more intricate structures on them. In this talk, we will introduce the main ingredients of quantization. As a concrete example, we will discuss the SL2-character variety, which is closely related to the Teichmüller space, and the skein algebra as its quantization.

Two knots are concordant to each other if they cobound an annulus in the product of S^3. We will discuss a few basic facts about knot concordance and look at J. Levine’s classical result on the knot concordance group.

Finding fillings of contact structures is a question that has been studied extensively over the last few decades. In this talk I will discuss some motivations for studying this question, and then visit a few ideas involved in the earliest results, due to Eliashberg and McDuff, that paved the way for a lot of current research in this direction.

 How can we recognize a map given certain combinatorial data? The Alexander method gives us the answer for self-homeomorphisms of finite-type surfaces. We can determine a homeomorphism of a surface (up to isotopy) based on how it acts on a finite number of curves. However, is there a way to apply this concept to recognize maps on other spaces? The answer is yes for a special class of maps, post-critically finite quadratic polynomials on the complex plane (Belk-Lanier-Margalit-Winarski).