Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

This is the first of several talks disussing embeddings of manifolds. I will discuss some general results for smooth manifolds, but focus on embeddings of contact manifolds into other contact manifolds. Particular attentaion will be payed to embeddings of contact 3-manifolds in contact 5-manifolds. I will discuss two approaches to this last problem that are being developed jointly with Yanki Lekili.

In this talk we consider the contact embeddings of contact 3-manifolds to S^5 with the standard contact structure.Every closed 3-manifold can be embedded to S^5 smoothly by Wall's theorem. The only known necessary condition to a contact embedding to the standard S^5 is the triviality of the Euler class of the contact structure.

This is joint work with Rob Kirby. Trisections are to 4-manifolds as Heegaard splittings are to 3-manifolds; a Heegaard splitting splits a 3-manifolds into 2 pieces each of which looks like a regular neighborhood of a bouquet of circles in R^3 (a handlebody), while a trisection splits a 4-manifold into 3 pieces of each of which looks like a regular neighborhood of a bouquet of circles in R^4. All closed, oriented 4-manifolds (resp. 3-manifolds) have trisections (resp.

An essential feature of the theory of 3-manifolds fibering over the circle is that they often admit infinitely many distinct structures as a surface bundle. In four dimensions, the story is much more rigid: a given 4-manifold admits only finitely many fiberings as a surface bundle over a surface. But how many is “finitely many”? Can a 4-manifold possess three or more distinct surface bundle structures? In this talk, we will survey some of the beautiful classical examples of surface bundles over surfaces with multiple fiberings, and discuss some of our own work.

We will define transverse surgery, and study its effects on open books, the Heegaard Floer contact invariant, and tightness. We show that surgery on the connected binding of a genus g open book that supports a tight contact structure preserves tightness if the surgery coefficient is greater than 2g-1. We also give criteria for when positive contact surgery on Legendrian knots will result in an overtwisted manifold.

A well known result of Giroux tells us that isotopy classes ofcontact structures on a closed three manifold are in one to onecorrespondence with stabilization classes of open book decompositions ofthe manifold. We will introduce a characterization of tightness of acontact structure in terms of corresponding open book decompositions, andshow how this can be used to resolve the question of whether tightness ispreserved under Legendrian surgery.