Symplectic Geometry and Holomorphic Curves

The goal of the program was to explore different aspects of the theory of holomorphic curves and their interaction. A special accent was made on applications to Symplectic geometry in low-dimensional topology.

Weekly Activities

• Weekly seminar on Tuesday at 1:30pm
• Weekly minicourses on Friday at 1:30pm

The time and length of both the seminars and the courses varied depending on the request of speakers, other competing seminars etc.

The minicourses during the second semester were:

• "Floer Cohomology and Picard-Lefschetz Theory" (P. Seidel, January-February, 2002). The first lecture was January 18th.
• "Holomorphic disks and invariants for 3-manifolds and smooth 4-manifolds" (P. Ozsvath and Z. Szabo, February 2002). The first lecture was Wednesday, February 6th.
• "Topological String Theory" (R. Dijkgraaf, March 2002)
• "Multivalued Morse Theory, Asymptotic Analysis and Mirror Symmetry" (K. Fukaya, March 2002)
• "Supersymmetry and Mirror Symmetry" (K. Hori, March-April, 2002)
• "Gromov-Witten Theory of $\mathbb C\mathbb P^1$" (R. Pandharipande, April 2002)

Conference

"Holomorphic Curves and Low-Dimensional Topology" (March 24-29, 2002)

C.H. Taubes delivered his Herman Weyl lectures during the conference.

Previous Semester

The minicourses during the first semester were:

• "Frobenius manifolds and integrable systems" (B. Dubrovin, October-November 2001)
• "Algebraic structures arising in Symplectic Field Theory" (Y. Eliashberg, November-December 2001)

There were also two "learning seminars":

• Quantum Cohomology via Givental's Lecture Notes
• Taubes' work on Holomorphic Curves for $S^1 \times S^2$

Finally, there was a conference: "Gromov-Witten Invariants and Integrable Systems" (December 8-13, 2001)