Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

This will be the first of a two part lecture series investigating questions in contact geometry from the perspective of Riemannian geometry. Interesting questions in Riemannian geometry arising from contact geometry have a long and rich history, but there have been few applications of Riemannian geometry to contact topology. In these talks I will discuss basic connections between Riemannian and contact geometry and some applications of these connections. I will also discuss the "contact sphere theorem" that Rafal Komendarczyk, Patrick Massot and I recently proved as well as other results.