Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

By a classical result of Eliashberg, contact manifolds in dimension 3 come in two flavors: tight (rigid) and overtwisted (flexible). Characterized by the presence of an "overtwisted disk", the overtwisted contact structures form a class where isotopy and homotopy classifications are equivalent.In higher dimensions, a class of flexible contact structures is yet to be found. However, some attempts to generalize the notion of an overtwisted disk have been made. One such object is a "plastikstufe" introduced by Niederkruger following some ideas of Gromov.

We will investigate a method of "seeing" properties of four dimensional symplectic spaces by looking at two dimensional pictures. We will see how to calculate the Euler characteristic, identify embedded surfaces, see intersection numbers, and how to see induced contact structures on the boundary of these manifolds.

We will introduce characteristic classes of surface bundles over surfaces. This will be a slower version of a talk I gave over the summer. The goal is to get to some of the recent papers on the subject.

It is a theorem of Bass, Lazard, and Serre, and, independently, Mennicke, that the special linear group SL(n,Z) enjoys the congruence subgroup property when n is at least 3. This property is most quickly described by saying that the profinite completion of the special linear group injects into the special linear group of the profinite completion of Z. There is a natural analog of this property for mapping class groups of surfaces.

The Heegaard Floer package provides a robust tool for studying contact 3-manifolds and their subspaces. Within the sphere of Heegaard Floer homology, several invariants of Legendrian and transverse knots have been defined. The first such invariant, constructed by Ozsvath, Szabo and Thurston, was defined combinatorially using grid diagrams. The second invariant was obtained by geometric means using open book decompositions by Lisca, Ozsvath, Stipsicz and Szabo. We show that these two previously defined invariant agree.

The hyperelliptic Torelli group SI(S) is the subgroup of the mapping class group of a surface S consisting of elements which commute with a fixed hyperelliptic involution and which act trivially on homology. The group SI(S) appears in a variety of settings, for example in the context of the period mapping on the Torelli space of a Riemann surface and also as a kernel of the classical Burau representation of the braid group. We will show that the cohomological dimension of SI(S) is g-1; this result fits nicely into a pattern with other subgroups of

There are two simple ways to construct new surface bundles over surfaces from old ones, namely, we can connect sum along the base or the fiber. In joint work with Inanc Baykur, we construct explicit surface bundles over surfaces that are indecomposable in both senses. This is achieved by first translating the problem into one about embeddings of surface groups into mapping class groups.

There is little known about the existence of contact strucutres in high dimensions, but recently in work of Casals, Pancholi and Presas the 5 dimensional case is largely understood. In this talk I will discuss the existence of contact structures on 5-manifold and outline an alternate construction that will hopefully prove that any almost contact structure on a 5-manifold is homotopic, though almost contact structures, to a contact structure.