Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

In this talk we are going to present a theorem that can be seen as related to S. Smale's theorem on the topology of the space of Legendrian loops. The framework will be slightly different and the space of Legendrian curves will be replaced by a smaller space $C_{\beta}$, that appears to be convenient in some variational problems in contact form geometry. We will also talk about the applications and the possible extensions of this result. This is a joint work with V. Martino.

We look at a paper of McMullen "Braid Groups and Hodge Theory" exploring representations of braid groups and their connections to arithemetic lattices.

We classify the Legendrian torus knots in S1XS2 with tight contact structure up to isotopy. This is a joint work with Feifei Chen and Fan Ding.

We discuss two concepts of low-dimensional topology in higher dimensions: near-symplectic manifolds and overtwisted contact structures. We present a generalization of near-symplectic 4-manifolds to dimension 6. By near-symplectic, we understand a closed 2-form that is symplectic outside a small submanifold where it degenerates. This approach uses some singular mappings called generalized broken Lefschetz fibrations. An application of this setting appears in contact topology.

The goal of this talk is to study geography and classification problem for Stein fillings of contact structures supported by planar open books. In the first part we will prove that for contact structures supported by planar open books Stein fillings have a finite geography. In the second part we will outline an approach to classify Stein fillings of manifolds supported by planar open books.

We study some finite quotients of the A_n Milnor fibre which coincide with the Stein surfaces that appear in Fintushel and Stern's rational blowdown construction. We show that these Stein surfaces have no exact Lagrangian submanifolds by using the already available and deep understanding of the Fukaya category of the A_n Milnor fibre coming from homological mirror symmetry. On the contrary, we find Floer theoretically essential monotone Lagrangian tori, finitely covered by the monotone tori that we studied in the A_n Milnor fibre.

One of the most outstanding problems in differential geometry is concerned with flexibility of closed surface in Euclidean 3-space: Is it possible to continuously deform a smooth closed surface without changing its intrinsic metric structure? In this talk I will give a quick survey of known results in this area, which is primarily concerned with convex surfaces, and outline a program for studying the general case.

We will give an overview of open book foliation method by emphasizing the aspect that it is a generalization of Birman-Menasco's braid foliation theory. We explain how surfaces in open book reflects topology and (contact) geometry of underlying 3-manifolds, and will give several applications. This talk is based on joint work with Keiko Kawamuro.

The talk will be about manifolds covered by the Euclidean space yet admitting no complete metric of nonpositive curvature.