Ziggurats and taut foliations

Series
Geometry Topology Seminar
Time
Monday, September 14, 2026 - 2:00pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Jonathan Zung – Georgia Tech – jzung3@gatech.eduhttps://jonathanzung.github.io/
Organizer
John Etnyre

Given a link in a closed 3-manifold, which Dehn surgery multislopes give rise to 3-manifolds with taut foliations? In this talk, I will discuss the ziggurat phenomenon: restricting to those foliations transverse to a fixed flow on the link complement, the set of multislopes typically has a fractal staircase shape with rational corners. In joint work with Thomas Massoni, we explain the ziggurat phenomenon in some contexts using tools from contact geometry. For those who have already seen a talk about this work, I'll try to emphasize some different aspects.