Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

A well-known problem in discerte convex geometry, attributed to the Dutch painter Durrer and first formulated by G. C. Shephard, is concerned with whether every convex polyope P in Euclidean 3-space has a simpe net, i.e., whether the surface of P can be isometrically embedded in the Euclidean plane after it has been cut along some spanning tree of its edges. In this talk we show that the answer is yes after an affine transformation. In particular the combinatorial structure of P plays no role in deciding its unfoldability, which settles a question of Croft, Falconer, and Guy. The proof employs a topological lemma which provides a criterion for checking embeddedness of immersed disks.

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.

In this series of talks I will discuss various special plane fields on 3-manifold. Specifically we will consider folaitions and contact structures and the relationship between them. We will begin by sketching a proof of Eliashberg and Thurston's famous theorem from the 1990's that says any sufficiently smooth foliation can be approximated by a contact structure. In the remaining talks I will discuss ongoing research that sharpens our understanding of the relation between foliations and contact structures.

This is the second in the series of two talks aimed to discuss a recent work of Ontaneda which gives a poweful method of producing negatively curved manifolds. Ontaneda's work adds a lot of weight to the often quoted Gromov's prediction that in a sense most manifolds (of any dimension) are negatively curved. In the second talk I shall discuss some ideas of the proof.