Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

I will describe some results concerning factorizations ofdiffeomorphisms of compact surfaces with boundary. In particular, Iwill describe a refinement of the well-known \emph{right-veering}property, and discuss some applications to the problem ofcharacterization of geometric properties of contact structures interms of monodromies of supporting open book decompositions.

In this talk we recall some modular techniques (chinese remaindering,rational reconstruction, etc.) that play a crucial role in manycomputer algebra applications, e.g., for solving linear systems over arational function field, for evaluating determinants symbolically,or for obtaining results by ansatz ("guessing"). We then discuss howmuch our recent achievements in the areas of symbolic summation andintegration and combinatorics benefited from these techniques.