Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

It is known that a class of codimension one foliations, namely "taut foliations", have subtle relation with the topology of a 3-manifold. In early 80s, David Gabai introduced the theory of "sutured manifolds" to study these objects and more than 20 years later, Andres Juhasz developed a Floer type theory, namely "Sutured Floer Homology", that turned out to be very useful in answering the question of when a 3-manifold with boundary supports a taut foliation.