Joint IAS/Princeton University Symplectic Geometry Seminar

We describe the recently observed relation between knot contact homology and open topological strings. This in particular gives two ways of looking at the augmentation variety from knot contact homology, which describe the relevant string theory at the level of the disk. We discuss a generalization of knot contact homology in the spirit of full symplectic field theory that corresponds to full quantum string theory and conjecture a relation to the recursion relations for the colored HOMFLY polynomial.