Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

It is known that any complete nonnegatively curved metric on the plane is conformally equivalent to the Euclidean metric. In the first half of the talk I shall explain that the conformal factors that show up correspond precisely to smooth subharmonic functions of minimal growth. The proof is function-theoretic. This characterization of conformal factors can be used to study connectedness properties of the space of complete nonnegatively curved metrics on the plane. A typical result is that the space of metrics cannot be separated by a finite dimensional subspace. The proofs use infinite-dimensional topology and dimension theory. This is a joint work with Jing Hu.

Legendrian contact homology is an invariant in contact geometry that assigns to each Legendrian submanifold a dg-algebra. While well-defined, it depends upon counts of holomorphic curves that can be hard to calculate in practice. In this talk, we introduce a class of Legendrian tori constructed as the product of collections of Legendrian knots. For this class, we discuss how to explicitly compute the dg-algebra invariant of the tori in terms of diagram projections of the constituent Legendrian knots.

It is a natural question to ask whether one can deduce topological properties of a finite--volume three--manifold from its Riemannian invariants such as volume and systole. In all generality this is impossible, for example a given manifold has sequences of finite covers with either linear or sub-linear growth. However under a geometric assumption, which is satisfied for example by some naturally defined sequences of arithmetic manifolds, one can prove results on the asymptotics of the first integral homology. I will try to explain these results in the compact case (this is part of a joint work with M. Abert, N. Bergeron, I. Biringer, T. Gelander, N. Nikolov and I. Samet) and time permitting I will discuss their extension to manifolds with cusps such as hyperbolic knot complements.