Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

A contact manifold with boundary naturally gives rise to a sutured manifold, as defined by Gabai. Honda, Kazez and Matic have used this relationship to define an invariant of contact manifolds with boundary in sutured Floer homology, a Heegaard-Floer-type invariant of sutured manifolds developed by Juhasz. More recently, Kronheimer and Mrowka have defined an invariant of sutured manifolds in the setting of monopole Floer homology. In this talk, I'll describe work-in-progress to define an invariant of contact manifolds with boundary in their sutured monopole theory. If time permits, I'll talk about analogues of Juhasz' sutured cobordism maps and the Honda-Kazez-Matic gluing maps in the monopole setting. Likely applications of this work include an obstruction to the existence of Lagrangian cobordisms between Legendrian knots in S^3. Other potential applications include the construction of a bordered monopole theory, following an outline of Zarev. This is joint work with Steven Sivek.

I will describe a new way to depict any smooth, closed oriented 4-manifold using a surface decorated with circles, along with a set of moves that relate any pair of such depictions.

I will explain in details starting with the basics, how the bimodules over some polynomial rings (cohomology of grasmanians) categorify the irreducible representations of sl(2) or U_q(sl(2).The main goal is to give an introduction to categorification theory. The talk will be accessible to graduate students.

Rob Kirby and I have been thinking for a while now about stable maps to 2-manifolds, which we call "Morse 2-functions", to stress the analogy with standard Morse theory, which studies stable maps to 1-manifolds. In this talk I will focus on the extent to which we can extend that analogy to the way in which handle decompositions combinatorialize Morse functions, especially in low dimensions. By drawing the images of attaching maps and some extra data, one describes the total space of a Morse function and the Morse function, up to diffeomorphism. I will discuss how much of that works in the context of Morse 2-functions. This is important because Rob Kirby and I have spent most of our time thinking about stable homotopies between Morse 2-functions, which should be thought of as giving "moves" between Morse 2-functions, but to honestly call them "moves" we need to make sure we have a reasonable way to combinatorialize Morse 2-functions to begin with.