Friday, October 10, 2014 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
John Etnyre – Georgia Tech
This is the first of several talks disussing embeddings of manifolds. I will discuss some general results for smooth manifolds, but focus on embeddings of contact manifolds into other contact manifolds. Particular attentaion will be payed to embeddings of contact 3-manifolds in contact 5-manifolds. I will discuss two approaches to this last problem that are being developed jointly with Yanki Lekili.
Friday, October 11, 2013 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
John Etnyre – Georgia Tech
In this talk we will extend the sutured product disk decompositions from the last talk to construct foliations on some knot complements and see how this can help understand the minimal genus of Seifert surfaces for knots and links.
Friday, October 4, 2013 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
John Etnyre – Georgia Tech
Gabai has a nice criteria for recognizing fibered knots in 3-manifolds. This criteria is best described in terms of sutured manifolds and simple sutured hierarchies. We will introduce this terminology and prove Gabai's result. Given time (or in subsequent talks) we might discuss generalizations concerning constructing foliations on knot compliments and 3-manifolds in general. Such results are very useful in understanding the minimal genus representatives of homology classes in the manifold (in particular, the minimal genus of a Seifert surface for a knot).