Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Legendrian knots are an important kind of knot in contact topology. One of their invariants,  the Thurston-Bennequin number, has an upper bound for any given knot type, called max-tb. Using convex surface theory, we will compute the max-tb of positive torus knots and show that two max-tb positive torus knots are Legendrian isotopic. If time permits, we will show that any non max-tb positive torus knot is obtained from the unique max-tb positive torus knot by a sequence of stabilizations.