Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

A Stein manifold is a complex manifold with particularly nice convexity properties. In real dimensions above 4, the existence of a Stein structure is essentially a homotopical question, but for 4-manifolds the situation is more subtle. In this talk we will consider the existence of such structures in the ambient settings, that is, manifolds/domains with various degree of convexity as open/compact subsets of a complex manifold, e.g. complex 2-space C^2. In particular, I will discuss the following question: Which homology spheres embed in C^2 as the boundary of a Stein domain? This question was first considered and explored in detail by Gompf. At that time, he made a fascinating conjecture that no non-trivial Brieskorn homology sphere, with either orientation, embeds in C^2 as a Stein boundary. In this talk, I will survey what we know about this conjecture, and report on some closely related recent work in progress that ties to an interesting symplectic rigidity phenomena in low dimensions.

Spaces of fatgraphs have long been used to study a variety of topics in math and physics. In this talk, we introduce two spaces of fatgraphs arising in string topology—one which parameterizes operations on chains of the free loop space of a manifold and one which parametrizes operations on Hochschild cochains of a “V-infinity” algebra. We present a conjecture relating these two spaces to one another and to the moduli space of Riemann surfaces. We also introduce polyhedra called “assocoipahedra” which generalize Stasheff’s associahedra to algebras with a compatible co-inner product. Assocoipahedra are used to prove that the dioperad governing V-infinity algebras satisfies certain algebraic properties. 

Fintushel and Stern showed that the Brieskorn sphere Σ(2, 3, 7) bounds a rational homology ball, while its non-trivial Rokhlin invariant obstructs it from bounding an integral homology ball. It is known that their argument can be modified to show that the figure-eight knot is rationally slice, and we use this fact to provide the first additional examples of Brieskorn spheres that bound rational homology balls but not integral homology balls, including two infinite families. This is joint work with Selman Akbulut.

Annular Rasmussen invariants are invariants of braid closures which generalize the Rasmussen s invariant and come from an integer bifiltration on Khovanov-Lee homology. In this talk we will explain some connections between the annular Rasmussen invariants and other topological information. Additionally we will state theorems about restrictions on the possible values of annular Rasmussen invariants and a computation of the invariants for all 3-braid closures, or conjugacy classes of 3-braids. Time permitting, we will sketch some proofs.