Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

A smooth knot in a contact 3-manifold is called Legendrian if it is always tangent to the contact planes. In this talk, I will discuss Legendrian knots in R^3 and the solid torus where knots can be conveniently viewed using their `front projections'. In particular, I will describe how certain decompositions of front projections known as `normal rulings' (introduced by Fuchs and Chekanov-Pushkar) can be used to give combinatorial descriptions for parts of the HOMFLY-PT and Kauffman polynomials.

 Deciding how to unknot a knotted piece of string (with its ends glued together) is not only a difficult problem in the real world, it is also a difficult and long studied problem in mathematics. (There are several notions of what one might mean by "unknotting" and I will leave the exact meaning a bit vague in this abstract.) In the past mathematicians have used a vast array of techniques --- from geometry to algebra, and even PDEs --- to study this question. I will discuss this question and (partially) recast it in terms of 4 dimensional topology.

We adapt techniques derived from the study of quasi-flats in Right Angled Artin Groups, and apply them to 2-dimensional Graph Braid Groups to show that the groups B_2(K_n) are quasi-isometrically distinct for all n.

We will prove that the mapping class group is finitely presented, using its action on the arc complex. We will also use the curve complex to show that the abstract commensurator of the mapping class group is the extended mapping class group. If time allows, we will introduce the complex of minimizing cycles for a surface, and use it to compute the cohomological dimension of the Torelli subgroup of the mapping class group. This is a followup to the previous talk, but will be logically independent.

Non-loose knots is a special class of knots studied in contact geometry. Last couple of years have shown some applications of these kinds of knots. Even though defined for a long time, not much is known about their classification except for the case of unknot. In this talk we will summarize what is known and tell about the recent work in which we are trying to give classification in the case of trefoil.

We discuss necessary and sufficient conditions of a subset X of the sphere S^n to be the image of the unit normal vector field (or Gauss map) of a closed orientable hypersurface immersed in Euclidean space R^{n+1}.

The mapping class group is the group of symmetries of a surface (modulo homotopy). One way to study the mapping class group of a surface S is to understand its action on the set of simple closed curves in S (up to homotopy). The set of homotopy classes of simple closed curves can be organized into a simplicial complex called the complex of curves. This complex has some amazing features, and we will use it to prove a variety of theorems about the mapping class group. We will also state some open questions.

Knot contact homology (KCH) is a combinatorially defined topological invariant of smooth knots introduced by Ng. Work of Ekholm, Etnyre, Ng and Sullivan shows that KCH is the contact homology of the unit conormal lift of the knot. In this talk we describe a monodromy result for knot contact homology,namely that associated to a path of knots there is a connecting homomorphism which is invariant under homotopy. The proof of this result suggests a conjectural interpretation for KCH via open strings, which we will describe.

The study of Legendrian and transversal knots has been an essential part of contact topology for quite some time now, but until recently their study in overtwisted contact structures has been virtually ignored. In the past few years that has changed. I will review what is know about such knots and discuss recent work on the "geography" and "botany" problem.