Activities

Most activities will be taking place at the Institute for Advanced Study.

During the workshop we will have several mini-courses, research talks and seminars, but during the first three weeks we plan to allow ample time for collaboration among the workshop participants. During the last week of the workshop we expect to have a more conference type schedule with numerous talks each day.

The location of talks will vary throughout the workshop so please take note of the room for each talk.

All Lectures this first week will be in the seminar room in Bloomberg Hall.
(We do not have this room on Monday or Friday afternoon, but if there are any activities scheduled another room will be found.)

Stipsicz: Heegaard Floer invariants and tight contact structures on Seifert fibered 3-manifolds
Abstract: Heegaard Floer invariants and tight contact structures on 3-manifolds seem to capture important differential topological information about the underlying 3-manifold. We will explore some of the relations between them for small Seifert fibered 3-manifolds.

Honda: Convex surfaces, open books and right veering monodromy

Rasmussen: Triply graded knot homologies
Abstract: I'll discuss recent developments in the theory of Khovanov homology related to homological generalizations of the HOMFLY polynomial. I'll start with the basics - Khovanov's original construction for the Jones polynomial - and explain how Khovanov and Rozansky's recent construction of a triply graded theory relates to them. I'll also describe recent work with Dunfield and Gukov on properties one might expect a triply graded theory to have, including a promising conjectured relation with the knot Floer homology.

Owens: Unknotting information from Heegaard Floer Homology

Mrowka: TBA

Lectures on Tuesday will be in the seminar room in Bloomberg Hall.
The Lecture on Wednesday will be in the West Building Lecture Hall.
Lectures on Thursday and Friday will be in the seminar room in Simonyi Hall.

Manolescu: Link invariants from quiver varieties
Abstract: I will explain some of the ideas behind the combinatorial invariants of Khovanov-Rozansky, the symplectic invariants of Seidel-Smith, and I will present some generalizations and related results. I'll start with a gentle introduction to quiver varieties, then I'll discuss how one can use Floer homology to build invariants and to give a symplectic geometric interpretation of the Jones polynomial.

Auroux: Fiber Sum Stabilization of Lefschetz fibrations

Plamenevskaya: Khovanov homology, Heegaard Floer invariants, and contact structures

Vidussi: Isotopy problems for surfaces in symplectic 4-manifolds

Hofer: Polyfolds and Fredholm Theory with Operations

McDuff: Branched Manifolds

All lectures will be in the seminar room in Simonyi Hall.

Hofer: Polyfolds and Fredholm Theory with Operations

Perutz: Broken pencils and four-manifold invariants

B. Parker: Holomorphic curves in Lagrangian torus fibrations

Wendl: Holomorphic foliations and contact 3-manifolds
Abstract: Some impressive results about Reeb dynamics in dimension 3 have come from the study of singular foliations by holomorphic curves. I'll sketch the (as yet undeveloped) general theory of such objects and some ideas for using them to define Floer-type invariants, then explain how to construct holomorphic foliations on overtwisted contact manifolds.

Hutchings: Embedded contact homology
Abstract: I will review the definition of the embedded contact homology of a
contact 3-manifold. I will then compare this with Ozsvath-Szabo and Seiberg-
Witten Floer homology (to which it is conjecturally isomorphic), and with
symplectic field theory (which is different but related).

Ozsvath: Knot Floer Homology and Rational Surgeries

Lipshitz: A cylindrical picture of Heegaard-Floer, and elaborations

Activities during the conference week can be found here.