Curvature and (contact) topology

Friday, January 23, 2015 - 15:30 to 16:30
704 Thackeray Hall
Speaker Information
John Etnyre
Georgia Institute of Technology

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Abstract or Additional Information

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. This is joint work with Rafal Komendarezyk and Patrick Massot.