Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

The soul of a complete, noncompact, connected Riemannian manifold (M; g) of non-negative sectional curvature is a compact, totally convex, totally geodesic submanifold such that M is diffeomorphic to the normal bundle of the soul. Hence, understanding of the souls of M can reduce the study of M to the study of a compact set. Also, souls are metric invariants, so understanding how they behave under deformations of the metric is useful to analyzing the space of metrics on M. In particular, little is understood about the case when M = R2 .

In this talk a curve complex HC(S) closely related to the "Cyclic Cycle Complex" (Bestvina-Bux-Margalit) and the "Complex of Cycles" (Hatcher) is defined for an orientable surface of genus g at least 2. The main result is a simple algorithm for calculating distances and constructing quasi-geodesics in HC(S). Distances between two vertices in HC(S) are related to the "Seifert genus" of the corresponding link in S x R, and behave quite differently from distances in other curve complexes with regards to subsurface projections.

Weinstein cobordisms give a natural relationship on the set of Weinstein domains. Flexible Weinstein domains are minimal with respect to this relationship. In this talk, I will use these minimal domains to construct maximal Weinstein domains: any two high-dimensional Weinstein domains with the same topology are Weinstein subdomains of a maximal Weinstein domain also with the same topology. Using this construction, a wide range of new Weinstein domains can be produced, for example exotic cotangent bundles of spheres containing many different closed exact Lagrangians.

I will describe the h-principle philosophy and explain some recent developments on the flexible side of symplectic topology, including Murphy's h-principle for loose Legendrians and Cieliebak and Eliashberg's construction of flexible symplectic manifolds in high-dimensions.

This is a survey talk on the knot concordance group and the homology cobordism group.

In this talk I will describe those linear subspaces of $\mathbf{R}^d$ which can be formed by taking the linear span of lattice points in a half-open parallelepiped. I will draw some connections between this problem and Keith Ball's cube slicing theorem, which states that the volume of any slice of the unit cube $[0,1]^d$ by a codimension-$k$ subspace is at most $2^{k/2}$.

Mapping classes are the natural topological symmetries of surfaces. Their study is often restricted to the orientation-preserving ones, which form a normal subgroup of index two in the group of all mapping classes. In this talk, we discuss orientation-reversing mapping classes. In particular, we show that Lehmer's question from 1933 on Mahler measures of integer polynomials can be reformulated purely in terms of a comparison between orientation-preserving and orientation-reversing mapping classes.

Unlike symplectic structures in 4-manioflds, contact structures are abundant in 3-dimension. Martinet showed that there exists a contact structure on any closed oriented 3-manifold. After that Lutz showed that there exist a contact structure in each homotopy class of plane fields. In this talk, we will review the theorems of Lutz and Martinet.

It is a classical theorem in algebraic topology that the loop space of a suitable Lie group can be modeled by an infinite dimensional variety, called the loop Grassmannian. It is also well known that there is an algebraic analog of loop Grassmannians, known as the affine Grassmannian of an algebraic groop (this is an ind-variety). I will explain how in motivic homotopy theory, the topological result has the "expected" analog: the Gm-loop space of a suitable algebraic group is A^1-equivalent to the affine Grassmannian.