Contact Topology in Dimension Three and Higher, July 28 - August 1, 2014

Georgia Tech Research Corporation, Atlanta GA

Investigators

Abstract

This grant supports US participants expenses in the workshop "Contact Geometry in Dimension Three and Higher" to be held at University College London, from July 28 to August 1, 2014. This workshop aims to bring together researchers and students from around the world working in contact geometry and related areas in symplectic topology. There are large groups of researchers in both the U.S. and Europe working in contact topology; and to foster further developments in the field it is important that there is good communication between these research groups. This conference will help provide some of that communication. The workshop includes topics such as pseudo-holomorphic curves, h-principles, symplectic dynamics and Stein manifolds, with the specific goal of introducing higher-dimensional techniques to participants who might be more familiar with low dimensions, or vice versa. The program will be a mixture of ordinary research talks with more in-depth mini-courses on topics of recent interest. The mini-courses will be "Orderability and Rabinowitz Floer theory" by Peter Albers (Munster) and Will Merry (ETH Zurich), "Flexibility in higher-dimensional contact geometry" by Patrick Massot (École Polytechnique) and Emmy Murphy (MIT), and "Intersection theory of punctured holomorphic curves and applications" by Richard Siefring (MPI Leipzig) and Chris Wendl (UCL). The exact list of research talks will be determined closer to the time of the workshop to reflect the latest developments in the field. Details can be found on the workshop web page at http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~ucahcwe/workshop.html