Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

The question of what conditions guarantee that a symplectic$S^1$ action is Hamiltonian has been studied for many years. Sue Tolmanand Jonathon Weitsman proved that if the action is semifree and has anon-empty set of isolated fixed points then the action is Hamiltonian.Furthermore, Cho, Hwang, and Suh proved in the 6-dimensional case that ifwe have $b_2^+=1$ at a reduced space at a regular level $\lambda$ of thecircle valued moment map, then the action is Hamiltonian.

We will give an overview of ideas that go into solution of Yamabe problem: Given a compact Riemannian manifold (M,g) of dimension n > 2, find a metric conformal to g with constant scalar curvature.

We say that a cover of surfaces S-> X has the Birman--Hilden property if the subgroup of the mapping class group of X consisting of mapping classes that have representatives that lift to S embeds in the mapping class group of S modulo the group of deck transformations. We identify one necessary condition and one sufficient condition for when a cover has this property. We give new explicit examples of irregular branched covers that do not satisfy the necessary condition as well as explicit covers that satisfy the sufficient condition.

I'll talk about joint work with Sam Taylor. We characterize convex cocompact subgroups of mapping class groups that arise as subgroups of specially embedded right-angled Artin groups. We use this to construct convex cocompact subgroups of Mod(S) whose orbit maps into the curve complex have small Lipschitz constants.

Knot Contact Homology is a powerful invariant assigning to each smooth knot in three-space a differential graded algebra. The homology of this algebra is in general difficult to calculate. We will discuss the cord algebra of a knot, which allows us to calculate the grading 0 knot contact homology. We will also see a method of extracting information from augmentations of the algebra.

The topic of smooth 4-manifolds is a long established, yetunderdeveloped one. Its mystery lies partly in its wealth of strangeexamples, coupled with a lack of generally applicable tools to putthose examples into a sensible framework, or to effectively study4-manifolds that do not satisfy rather strict criteria. I will outlinerecent work that associates objects from symplectic topology, calledweak Floer A-infinity algebras, to general smooth, closed oriented4-manifolds. As time permits, I will speculate on a "genus-g Fukayacategory of smooth 4-manifolds.

In this talk I will discuss bounds on the slice genus of aknot coming from it's representation as a braid closure, starting withthe slice-Bennequin inequality. From there I will use surfacebraiding techniques of Rudolph and Kamada to exhibit a new lower boundon the ribbon genus of a knot, given some knowledge about what slicesurfaces it bounds.

A contact structure on a 3-manifold is called overtwisted ifthere is a certain kind of embedded disk called an overtwisted disk; it istight if no such disk exists. A Legendrian knot in an overtwisted contact3-manifold is loose if its complement is overtwisted and non-loose if itscomplement is tight. We define and compare two geometric invariants, depthand tension, that measure how far from loose is a non-loose knot. This isjoint work with Sinem Onaran.

We will start by defining the Jones polynomial of a knot and talking about some of its classical applications to knot theory. We will then define a fancier version ("categorification") of the Jones polynomial, called Khovanov homology and mention some of its applications. We will conclude by talking about a further refinement, a Khovanov homotopy type, sketch some of the ideas behind its construction, and mention some applications.

Houghton's groups are a family of subgroups of infinite permutation groups known for their cohomological properties. Here, I describe some aspects of their geometry and metric properties including families of self-quasi-isomtries. This is joint work with Jose Burillo, Armando Martino and Claas Roever.