Curvature and (contact) topology

Series
Research Horizons Seminar
Time
Wednesday, October 31, 2012 - 12:05pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
John Etnyre – Georgia Tech, School of Math – http://people.math.gatech.edu/~etnyre/
Organizer
Robert Krone
Contact geometry is a beautiful subject that has important interactions with topology in dimension three. In this talk I will give a brief introduction to contact geometry and discuss its interactions with Riemannian geometry. In particular I will discuss a contact geometry analog of the famous sphere theorem and more generally indicate how the curvature of a Riemannian metric can influence properties of a contact structure adapted to it.