Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

In this series of (3-5) lectures, I will talk about different aspects of a class of contact 3-manifolds for which geometry, dynamics and topology interact subtly and beautifully. The talks are intended to include short surveys on "compatibility", "Anosovity" and "Conley-Zehnder indices". The goal is to use the theory of Contact Dynamics to show that conformally Anosov contact 3-manifolds (in particular, contact 3-manifolds with negative α-sectional curvature) are universally tight, irreducible and do not admit a Liouville cobordism to the tight 3-sphere.