Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

An embedding of a manifold into a trivial disc bundle over another manifold is called braided if projection onto the first factor gives a branched cover. This notion generalizes closed braids in the solid torus, and gives an explicit way to construct many embeddings in higher dimensions. In this talk, we will discuss when a covering map of surfaces lift to a braided embedding.

A useful way of studying contact 3 manifolds is by looking at their open book decompositions. A result of Akbulut-Ozbagci, Ghiggini, and Loi-Piergallini showed that the manifold is filled by a Stein manifold if and only if the monodromy of an open book can be factorised as the product of positive Dehn twists. Then, the problem of classifying minimal fillings of contact 3 manifolds, or answering questions about which manifolds can be realised by Legendrian surgery, becomes questions about finding factorisations for a given mapping class. This talk will be expository and expand upon how these mapping classes come up, and also discuss known results, techniques, and future directions for research.

Gordon and Luecke showed that the knot complements determine the isotopy classes of knots in S^3. In this talk, we will study the topology of various knot complements in S^3: torus knots, cable knots, satellite knots, etc. As an application, we will see some knot invariants using knot complements.

Introduced by Hendricks and Manolescu in 2015, Involutive Heegaard Floer homology is a variation of the 3-manifold invariant Heegaard Floer homology which makes use of the conjugation symmetry of the Heegaard Floer complexes. This theory can be used to obtain two new invariants of homology cobordism. This talk will involve a brief overview of general Heegaard Floer homology, followed by a discussion of the involutive theory and some computations of the homology cobordism invariants.