Conormals and contact homology VII

Series
Geometry Topology Working Seminar
Time
Friday, March 1, 2013 - 11:30am for 1.5 hours (actually 80 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
John Etnyre – Ga Tech
Organizer
John Etnyre
In this series of talks I will begin by discussing the idea of studying smooth manifolds and their submanifolds using the symplectic (and contact) geometry of their cotangent bundles. I will then discuss Legendrian contact homology, a powerful invariant of Legendrian submanifolds of contact manifolds. After discussing the theory of contact homology, examples and useful computational techniques, I will combine this with the conormal discussion to define Knot Contact Homology and discuss its many wonders properties and conjectures concerning its connection to other invariants of knots in S^3.