## Seminars and Colloquia by Series

Monday, February 20, 2017 - 14:05 , Location: Skiles 006 , , University of Texas at Austin , , Organizer: Stavros Garoufalidis
A Jones surface for a knot in the three-sphere is an essential surface whose boundary slopes, Euler characteristic, and number of sheets correspond to quantities defined from the asymptotics of the degrees of colored Jones polynomial. The Strong Slope Conjecture by Garoufalidis and Kalfagianni-Tran predicts that there are Jones surfaces for every knot. A link diagram D is said to be a Murasugi sum of two links D' and D'' if a state graph of D has a cut vertex, which separates the graph into two state graphs of D' and D'', respectively. We may obtain a state surface in the complement of the link K represented by D by gluing the state surface for D and the state surface for D' along the disk filling the circle represented by the cut vertex in the state graph. The resulting surface is called the Murasugi sum of the two state surfaces. We consider near-adequate links which are certain Murasugi sums of near-alternating link diagrams with an adequate link diagram along their all-A state graphs with an additional graphical constraint. For a near-adequate knot, the Murasugi sum of the corresponding state surface is a Jones surface by the work of Ozawa. We discuss how this proves the Strong Slope Conjecture for this class of knots.
Monday, February 13, 2017 - 14:00 , Location: Skiles 006 , Nathan Sunukjian , Calvin College , Organizer: John Etnyre
A 2-knot is defined to be an embedding of S^2 in S^4. Unlike the theory of concordance for knots in S^3, the theory of concordance of 2-knots is trivial. This talk will be framed around the related concept of 0-concordance of 2-knots. It has been conjectured that this is also a trivial theory, that every 2-knot is 0-concordant to every other 2-knot. We will show that this conjecture is false, and in fact there are infinitely many 0-concordance classes. We'll in particular point out how the concept of 0-concordance is related to understanding smooth structures on S^4. The proof will involve invariants coming from Heegaard-Floer homology, and we will furthermore see how these invariants can be used shed light on other properties of 2-knots such as amphichirality and invertibility.
Monday, February 6, 2017 - 14:30 , Location: UGA Room 303 , Dan Cristofaro-Gardiner and John Etnyre , Harvard and Georgia Tech , Organizer: Caitlin Leverson
John Etnyre: "Embeddings of contact manifolds" Abstract: I will discuss recent results concerning embeddings and isotopies of one contact manifold into another. Such embeddings should be thought of as generalizations of transverse knots in 3-dimensional contact manifolds (where they have been instrumental in the development of our understanding of contact geometry). I will mainly focus on embeddings of contact 3-manifolds into contact 5-manifolds.  In this talk I will discuss joint work with Ryo Furukawa aimed at using braiding techniques to study contact embeddings. Braided embeddings give an explicit way to represent some (maybe all) smooth embeddings and should be useful in computing various invariants. If time permits I will also discuss other methods for embedding and constructions one may perform on contact submanifolds. Dan Cristofaro-Gardiner: "Beyond the Weinstein conjecture" Abstract: The Weinstein conjecture states that any Reeb vector field on a closed manifold has at least one closed orbit. The three-dimensional case of this conjecture was proved by Taubes in 2007, and Hutchings and I later showed that in this case there are always at least 2 orbits. While examples exist with exactly two orbits, one expects that this lower bound can be significantly improved with additional assumptions. For example, a theorem of Hofer, Wysocki, and Zehnder states that a generic nondegenerate Reeb vector field associated to the standard contact structure on $S^3$ has either 2, or infinitely many, closed orbits. We prove that any nondegenerate Reeb vector field has 2 or infinitely many closed orbits as long as the associated contact structure has torsion first Chern class. This is joint work with Mike Hutchings and Dan Pomerleano.
Wednesday, January 25, 2017 - 15:05 , Location: Skiles 006 , , Michigan State University , , Organizer: Stavros Garoufalidis
In a recent conjecture by Tian Yang and Qingtao Chen, it has been observedthat the log of Turaev-Viro invariants of 3-manifolds  at a special root ofunity grow  proportionnally to the level times hyperbolic volume of themanifold, as in the usual volume conjecture for the colored Jonespolynomial.In the case of link complements, we derive a formula to expressTuraev-Viro invariants as a sum of values of colored Jones polynomial, andget a proof of Yang and Chen's conjecture for a few link complements. Theformula also raises new questions about the asymptotics of colored Jonespolynomials. Joint with Effie Kalfagianni and Tian Yang.
Monday, January 23, 2017 - 14:05 , Location: Skiles 006 , Victoria Akin , University of Chicago , Organizer: Dan Margalit
The point-pushing subgroup of the mapping class group of a surface with a marked point can be considered topologically as the subgroup that pushes the marked point about loops in the surface. Birman demonstrated that this subgroup is abstractly isomorphic to the fundamental group of the surface, \pi_1(S). We can characterize this point-pushing subgroup algebraically as the only normal subgroup inside of the mapping class group isomorphic to \pi_1(S). This uniqueness allows us to recover a description of the outer automorphism group of the mapping class group.
Monday, January 16, 2017 - 14:05 , Location: Skiles 006 , None , None , Organizer: Dan Margalit
Monday, January 9, 2017 - 14:00 , Location: Skiles 006 , Huygens Ravelomanana , University of Georgia , Organizer: John Etnyre
Dehn surgery is a fundamental tool for constructing oriented 3-Manifolds. If we fix a knot K in an oriented 3-manifold Y and do surgeries with distinct slopes r and s, we can ask under which conditions the resulting oriented manifold Y(r) and Y(s) might be orientation preserving homeomorphic. The cosmetic surgery conjecture state that if the knot exterior is boundary irreducible  then this can't happen. My talk will be about the case where Y is an homology sphere and K is an hyperbolic knot.
Monday, December 5, 2016 - 14:00 , Location: Skiles 006 , Akhil Mathew , Harvard University , Organizer: Kirsten Wickelgren
The Grothendieck group K_0 of a commutative ring is well-known to be a \lambda-ring: although the exterior powers are non-additive, they induce maps on K_0 satisfying various universal identities. The \lambda-operations are known to give homomorphisms on higher K-groups. In joint work in progress with Barwick, Glasman, and Nikolaus, we give a general framework for such operations. Namely, we show that the K-theory space is naturally functorial with respect to polynomial functors, and describe a universal property of the extended K-theory functor. This extends an earlier algebraic result of Dold for K_0.
Friday, December 2, 2016 - 14:00 , Location: Skiles 006 , S. Suzuki , RIMS, Kyoto University , Organizer: Thang Le
The Drinfeld double of a finite dimensional Hopf algebra is a quasi-triangular Hopf algebra with the canonical element as the universal R matrix, and we obtain a ribbon Hopf algebra by adding the ribbon element. The universal quantum invariant is an invariant of framed links, and is constructed diagrammatically using a ribbon Hopf algebra. In that construction, a copy of the universal R matrix is attached to each positive crossing, and invariance under the Reidemeister III move is shown by the quantum Yang-Baxter equation of the universal R matrix. On the other hand, R. Kashaev showed that the Heisenberg double has the canonical element (the universal S matrix) satisfying the pentagon relation. In this talk we reconstruct the universal quantum invariant using Heisenberg double, and extend it to an invariant of colored ideal triangulations of the complement. In this construction, a copy of the universal S matrix is attached to each tetrahedron and the invariance under the colored Pachner (2,3) move is shown by the pentagon equation of the universal S matrix
Wednesday, November 30, 2016 - 15:00 , Location: Skiles 006 , Peter Samuelson , Edinburgh , , Organizer: Thang Le
The Homfly skein algebra of a surface is defined using links in thickened surfaces modulo local "skein" relations. It was shown by Turaev that this quantizes the Goldman symplectic structure on the character varieties of the surface. In this talk we give a complete description of this algebra for the torus. We also show it is isomorphic to the elliptic Hall algebra of Burban and Schiffmann, which is an algebra whose elements are (formal sums of) sheaves on an elliptic curve, with multiplication defined by counting extensions of such sheaves. (Joint work with H. Morton.)