Plane fields on 3-manifolds I

Series
Geometry Topology Working Seminar
Time
Friday, March 30, 2012 - 2:00pm for 2 hours
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
John Etnyre – Ga Tech
Organizer
John Etnyre

Please Note: Note this is a 2 hour talk

In this series of talks I will discuss various special plane fields on 3-manifold. Specifically we will consider folaitions and contact structures and the relationship between them. We will begin by sketching a proof of Eliashberg and Thurston's famous theorem from the 1990's that says any sufficiently smooth foliation can be approximated by a contact structure. In the remaining talks I will discuss ongoing research that sharpens our understanding of the relation between foliations and contact structures.