Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Gordon and Luecke showed that the knot complements determine the isotopy classes of knots in S^3. In this talk, we will study the topology of various knot complements in S^3: torus knots, cable knots, satellite knots, etc. As an application, we will see some knot invariants using knot complements.

I will discuss the prime decomposition of three-manifolds. First I will define the connect sum operation, irreducible and prime 3-manifolds. Then using the connect sum operation as "multiplication," I will show any closed oriented three-manifold decomposes uniquely into prime factors using spheres. If time permits, I will show another way of decomposing using discs.

The emergent shape of a knitted fabric is highly sensitive to the underlying stitch pattern. Here, by a stitch pattern we mean a periodic array of symbols encoding a set of rules or instructions performed to produce a swatch or a piece of fabric. So, it is crucial to understand what exactly these instructions mean in terms of mechanical moves performed using a yarn (a smooth piece of string) and a set of knitting needles (oriented sticks).

We will describe several appearances of Milnor’s invariants in the link Floer complex. This will include a formula that expresses the Milnor triple linking number in terms of the h-function. We will also show that the triple linking number is involved in a structural property of the d-invariants of surgery on certain algebraically split links. We will apply the above properties toward new detection results for the Borromean and Whitehead links. This is joint work with Gorsky, Lidman and Liu.

Lorentzian polynomials link continuous convex analysis and discrete convex analysis via tropical geometry. The tropical connection is used to produce Lorentzian polynomials from discrete convex functions.

The talk will discuss the relationship between topology and
geometry of Einstein 4-manifolds such as K3 surfaces.