Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Existence of tight contact structures is a fundamental question of contact topology. Etnyre and Honda first gave the example which doesn't admit any tight structure. The existence of fillable tight structures is also a subtle question. Here we give some new examples of hyperbolic 3-manifolds which do not admit any fillable structures.

Given a plane field $dz-xdy$ in $\mathbb{R}^3$. A Legendrian knot is a knot which at every point is tangent to the plane at that point. One can similarly define a Legendrian knot in any contact 3-manifold (manifold with a plane field satisfying some conditions). In this talk, we will explore Legendrian knots in $\mathbb{R}^3$, $J^1(S^1)$, and $\#^k(S^1\times S^2)$ as well as a few Legendrian knot invariants. We will also look at the relationships between a few of these knot invariants.

Auckly gave two examples of irreducible integer homology spheres (one toroidal and one hyperbolic) which are not surgery on a knot in the three-sphere. Using an obstruction coming from Heegaard Floer homology, we will provide infinitely many hyperbolic examples, as well as infinitely many examples with arbitrary JSJ decomposition. This is joint work with Lidman.

In honor of John Stallings' great paper, "How not to prove the Poincare conjecture", I will show how to reduce the smooth 4-dimensional Poincare conjecture to a (presumably incredibly difficult) statement in group theory. This is joint work with Aaron Abrams and Rob Kirby. We use trisections where Stallings used Heegaard splittings.

Given an action by a loop space on a structured ring spectrum we describe how to produce its associated quotient ring spectrum. We then describe how this structure may be leveraged to produce intermediate Hopf-Galois extensions of ring spectra, analogous to the way one produces intermediate Galois extensions from normal subgroups of a Galois group. We will give many examples of this structure in classical cobordism spectra and in particular describe an entirely new construction of the complex

In Watchareepan Atiponrat's thesis the properties of decomposable exact Lagrangian codordisms betweenLegendrian links in R^3 with the standard contact structure were studied. In particular, for any decomposableexact Lagrangian filling L of a Legendrian link K, one may obtain a normal ruling of K associated with L.Atiponrat's main result is that the associated normal rulings must have an even number of clasps.

In a 1958 paper, Milnor observed that then new work by Bott allowed him to show that the n sphere admits a vector bundle with non-trivial top Stiefel-Whitney class precisely when n=1,2,4, 8. This can be interpreted as a calculation of the mod 2 Hurewicz map for the classifying space BO, which has the structure of an infinite loopspace.

The commutator length of an element g in the commutator subgroup [G,G] of agroup G is the smallest k such that g is the product of k commutators. WhenG is the fundamental group of a topological space, then the commutatorlength of g is the smallest genus of a surface bounding a homologicallytrivial loop that represents g. Commutator lengths are notoriouslydifficult to compute in practice. Therefore, one can ask for asymptotics.This leads to the notion of stable commutator length (scl) which is thespeed of growth of the commutator length of powers of g.

This thesis studies the effect of transverse surgery on open books, the Heegaard Floer contact invariant, and tightness. We show that surgery on the connected binding of a genus g open book that supports a tight contact structure preserves tightness if the surgery coefficient is greater than 2g-1. We also give criteria for when positive contact surgery on Legendrian knots will result in an overtwisted manifold.

A trisection of a smooth, oriented, compact 4-manifold X is a decomposition into three diffeomorphic 4-dimensional 1-handlebodies with certain nice intersections properties. This is a very natural 4-dimensional analog of Heegaard splittings of 3-manifolds. In this talk I will define trisections of closed 4-manifolds, but will quickly move to the case of 4-manifolds with connected boundary. I will discuss how these "relative trisections" interact with open book decompositions on the bounding 3-manifold.