Previous Special Year Seminar

Min-max theory developed in the 80s by Pitts (using earlier work of Almgren) allows one to construct closed embedded minimal surfaces in 3-manifolds in great generality. The main challenge is to understand the geometry of the limiting minimal...

Lagrangian cobordisms between Legendrian submanifolds arise in Relative Symplectic Field Theory. In recent years, there has been much progress on answering qualitative questions such as: For a fixed pair of Legendrians, does there exist a Lagrangian...

In this series of two talks we will discuss Weinstein structures endowed with a Lefschetz fibration in terms of the Legendrian front projection. The main focus is on Weinstein manifolds which admit a Weinstein Lefschetz fibration with an $A_k$-fibre...

In this series of two talks we will discuss Weinstein structures endowed with a Lefschetz fibration in terms of the Legendrian front projection. The main focus is on Weinstein manifolds which admit a Weinstein Lefschetz fibration with an $A_k$-fibre...

Satellite operations are a common way to create interesting knot types in the smooth category. It starts with a knot $K$, called the companion knot, in some manifold $M$ and another knot $P$, called the pattern, in $S^1 \times D^2$ and then creates...

I will describe some work in progress (maybe more accurately, wild speculation) regarding a version of the derived Fukaya category for contact 1-jet spaces $J^1(X)$. This category is built from Legendrian submanifolds equipped with augmentations...

In this talk we will describe two methods which shows that, under some rigidity assumptions on the involved Legendrian submanifolds, a Lagrangian cobordism is simply connected. The first one uses the functoriality of the fundamental class in...

Through the work of Agol and Wise, we know that all closed hyperbolic 3-manifolds are finitely covered by a surface bundle over the circle. Thus the geometry of these bundles indicates the geometry of general hyperbolic 3-manifolds. But there are...

This talk will discuss the question: To what extent are the fundamental groups of compact 3-manifolds determined (amongst the fundamental groups of compact 3-manifolds) by their finite quotients. We will discuss work that provides a positive answer...

I will talk about bilipschitz geometry of complex algebraic sets, focusing on the local geometry in dimension 2 (complex surface singularities), where the topological classification has long been understood in terms of 3-manifolds, while the...