Hello Topologist and Friends,

We are please to have Topology Seminar this Thursday (MSCS 514 at 3:30) given by Jeremy Van Horn-Morris form University of Arkansas.

Title: A survey of the mapping class group in contact and symplectic topology

Abstract: The past roughly twenty years in the study of contact 3-manifolds and symplectic 4-manifolds has been strongly influenced by work of Donaldson, Gompf and Giroux. These tools encode the differential geometric, and differential topological information coming from a contact or symplectic structure through the topological structure of an open book decomposition -- that is, a nicely fibered link. Many interesting properties of a contact structure are detectable in the monodromy maps of these fibrations. We'll introduce some of these properties (such as tight, and fillable) and connect their monodromy characterizations to properties of mapping classes previously studied in topology, and survey some of the recent applications and current interesting questions.