Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

A theorem of Chris Wendl allows you to completely characterize symplectic fillings of certain open book decompositions by factorizations of their monodromy into Dehn twists. Olga Plamenevskaya and I use this to generalize results of Eliashberg, McDuff and Lisca to classify the fillings of certain Lens spaces. I'll discuss this and a newer version of Wendl's theorem, joint with Wendl and Sam Lisi, this time for spinal open books, and discuss a few more applications.

For knots the hyperbolic geometry of the complement is known to be relatedto itsJones polynomial in various ways. We propose to study this relationship morecloselyby extending the Jones polynomial to graphs. For a planar graph we will showhow itsJones polynomial then gives rise to the hyperbolic volume of the polyhedronwhose1-skeleton is the graph. Joint with Francois Gueritaud and FrancoisCostantino.

Gromov defined the distortion of an embedding of S^1 into R^3 and asked whether every knot could be embedded with distortion less than 100. There are (many) wild embeddings of S^1 into R^3 with finite distortion, and this is one reason why bounding the distortion of a given knot class is hard. I will show how to give a nontrivial lower bound on the distortion of torus knots, which is sharp in the case of (p,p+1) torus knots. I will also mention some natural conjectures about the distortion, for example that the distortion of the (2,p)-torus knots is unbounded.

I will discuss a new general framework for cutting and gluing manifolds in topological quantum field theory (TQFT). Applying this method to Chern-Simons theory with gauge group SL(2,C) on a knot complement M leads to a systematic quantization of the SL(2,C) character variety of M. In particular, the classical A-polynomial of M becomes an operator "A-hat", the same operator that appears in the recursion relations of Garoufalidis et al. for colored Jones polynomials.