From Foliations to Contact Structures

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• Jonathan Bowden, Munich
• Wednesday 12 October 2016, 16:00-17:00
• MR13.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Ivan Smith.

In the mid 90’s Eliashberg and Thurston established a fundamental link between the more classical theory of (smooth!) foliations and that of contact topology in dimension 3, which, amongst other things, played an important role in Mrowka and Kronheimer’s proof of Property P Conjecture. Their theory gains its potency from the fact that Gabai gave a powerful method for constructing (smooth) taut foliations from on (irreducible) 3-manifolds from non-trivial homology classes.

On the other hand most foliations that occur in nature via (pseudo)-Anosov flows, surgery, gluing, blows ups… are not smooth in general. This naturally motivates the need to apply Eliashberg and Thurston’s theory to foliations of lower regularity. In this talk I will report on how (and hopefully why) their theory generalises. Time permitting I will discuss some applications and related questions.

This talk is part of the Differential Geometry and Topology Seminar series.

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