Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Modern homology theories have given many knot invariants with the following useful properties: they are additive with respect to connected sum, they give a lower bound for a knot's slice genus, and this lower bound is equal to the slice genus for torus knots. These invariants, called slice-torus invariants, include the Ozsváth–Szabó $\tau$ and Rasmussen $s$ invariants. We discuss how, on a large class of knots, the value of a slice-torus invariant is fully determined by these properties, and can be computed without reference to the homology theory. We also discuss results that follow from the existence of slice-torus invariants, and a potential connection to the smooth 4-dimensional Poincaré conjecture.

I will present a series of papers in which we constructed multi-soliton solutions to three-dimensional ($L^2$-subcritical) and four-dimensional ($L^2$-critical) Hartree equations. In these solutions, the soliton centers evolve according to an effective N-body system. Our work generalized and improved the 2009 result of Krieger–Martel–Raphaël, which constructed two-soliton solutions for the three-dimensional Hartree equation. In four dimensions, our results further yield the existence of multi-point pseudo-conformal blow-up via the pseudo-conformal symmetry.

One of the fundamental problems in contact topology is to classify contact structures on a given 3-manifold. In particular, classifying contact structures on surgeries along a given knot has been very poorly studied. The only fully understood case so far is that of the unknot  (lens spaces); for all other knots we have only partial results, or none at all. Several topological and algebraic tools have been developed to attack this problem. In this talk, we discuss recent developments and the strategy for classifying tight contact structures on surgeries along torus knots. This is joint work with John Etnyre, Bülent Tosun, and Konstantinos Varvarezos.

The theory of $p$-adic differential equations first rose to prominence after Dwork used them to prove the rationality of zeta functions of a positive characteristic variety in 1960. Since then, there has been growing interest in the category of convergent $F$-isocrystals and the subcategory of overconvergent $F$-isocrystals due to this subcategory having good cohomology theory with finiteness properties. Recent work by Grubb, Kedlaya and Upton examines when a convergent $F$-isocrystal is overconvergent by restricting to smooth curves on the scheme under a mild tameness assumption (measured by the Swan conductor). In my talk, I will introduce the above categories and talk about work in progress about bounding the Swan conductor of an overconvergent $F$-isocrystal in terms of data associated with the corresponding convergent $F$-isocrystal.