Friday, November 4, 2016 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
John Etnyre – Georgia Tech
I will give 2 or 3 lectures on Legendrian contact homology. This invariant has played a big role in our understanding of Legendrian submanifolds of contact manifolds in all dimensions. We will discuss the general definition but focus on the 3-dimensional setting where it easiest to compute (and describe Legendrian knots). I will also discuss the A^\infty structure associated to the linearized co-chain groups of contact homology.
Friday, October 28, 2016 - 14:00 for 1.5 hours (actually 80 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
John Etnyre – Georgia Tech
I will give 2 or 3 lectures on Legendrian contact homology. This invariant has played a big role in our understanding of Legendrian submanifolds of contact manifolds in all dimensions. We will discuss the general definition but focus on the 3-dimensional setting where it easiest to compute (and describe Legendrian knots). I will also discuss the A^\infty structure associated to the linearized co-chain groups of contact homology.
Friday, October 14, 2016 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Jennifer Hom – Georgia Tech
The knot concordance group consists of knots in the three-sphere modulo the equivalence relation of smooth concordance. We will discuss two concordance invariants coming from knot Floer homology: tau and epsilon.
Friday, October 7, 2016 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Jennifer Hom – Georgia Tech
The knot concordance group consists of knots in the three-sphere modulo the equivalence relation of smooth concordance. We will discuss varies ways to weaken the equivalence relation (e.g., considering locally flat concordances or concordances in more general four-manifolds) and what is known and unknown about the differences between the resulting groups.
Wednesday, October 5, 2016 - 10:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Shane Scott – Georgia Tech
In this lecture series, held jointly (via video conference) with the
University of Buffalo and the University of Arkansas, we aim to
understand the lecture notes by Vincent Guirardel on geometric small
cancellation. The lecture notes can be found here: https://perso.univ-rennes1.fr/vincent.guirardel/papiers/lecture_notes_pcmi.pdf This week we will begin Lecture 4.
Monday, September 26, 2016 - 10:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Justin Lanier – Georgia Tech
In this lecture series, held jointly (via video conference) with the University of Buffalo and the University of Arkansas, we aim to understand the lecture notes by Vincent Guirardel on geometric small cancellation. The lecture notes can be found here: https://perso.univ-rennes1.fr/vincent.guirardel/papiers/lecture_notes_pcmi.pdf
Friday, September 23, 2016 - 14:00 for 1.5 hours (actually 80 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
John Etnyre – Georgia Tech
I will discuss a process called a cork twist for relating homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic smooth 4-manifolds. This involves finding a contractible submanifold of a given 4-manifold, removing it, and re-gluing by a diffeomorphism of the boundary. This is a surprisingly simple way of relating non-diffeomorphic manifold that was discovered in the 1990s but has recently been getting a lot of attention.