Related papers: Lectures on open book decompositions and contact s…
This expository paper explores the interaction of group ordering with topological questions, especially in dimensions 2 and 3. Among the topics considered are surfaces, braid groups, 3-manifolds and their structures such as foliations and…
Let X/G be a 3-dimensional Calabi-Yau orbifold with codimension 2 singularities. The topology of crepant resolutions of X/G is described by the McKay correspondence (Reid, Ito). We study Calabi-Yau 3-folds Y that arise by deforming the…
The open book decompositions of the 3-sphere whose pages are pairs of pants have been fully understood for some time, through the lens of contact geometry. The purpose of this note is to exhibit a purely topological derivation of the…
These notes are based on a course that took place at the Universit\'e de Nantes in June 2011 during the "Trimester on Contact and Symplectic Topology". We will explain how holomorphic curves can be used to study symplectic fillings of a…
Despite spectacular advances in defining invariants for simply connected smooth and symplectic 4-dimensional manifolds and the discovery of effective surgical techniques, we still have been unable to classify simply connected smooth…
These are notes of my lecture courses given in the summer of 2024 in the School on Number Theory and Physics at ICTP in Trieste and in the 27th Brazilian Algebra Meeting at IME-USP in S\~ao Paulo. We give an elementary account of $p$-adic…
These notes are an expanded version of evening talks at the 2025 Georgia International Topology Conference, and an abbreviated version of talks at Georgia Tech, which were aimed at graduate students. The hope was to indicate a common…
In this note we observe that while all overtwisted contact structures on compact 3--manifolds are supported by planar open book decompositions, not all contact structures are. This has relevance to invariants of contact structures and also…
A real algebraic link in the 3-sphere is defined as the zero locus in the 3-sphere of a real algebraic function from $\mathbb{R}^4$ to $\mathbb{R}^2$. A real algebraic open book decomposition on the 3-sphere is by definition the Milnor…
The goal of this article is to survey recent developments in the theory of contact structures in dimension three.
We study low-dimensional problems in topology and geometry via a study of contact and Cauchy-Riemann ($CR$) structures. A contact structure is called spherical if it admits a compatible spherical $CR$ structure. We will talk about spherical…
This paper proves the Giroux Correspondence in dimension three using Heegaard splittings of contact manifolds. In two of the authors earlier paper they proved the Giroux Correspondence for tight contact 3-manifolds via convex Heegaard…
We introduce the notion of a nested open book, a submanifold equipped with an open book structure compatible with an ambient open book, and describe in detail the special case of a push-off of the binding of an open book. This enables us to…
These are lecture notes on Floer and Rabinowitz-Floer homology written for a graduate course at UNICAMP August-December 2016 and a mini-course held at IMPA in August 2017.
Lectures presented at the Les Houches 2016 Summer School "Integrability: from Statistical Systems to Gauge Theory".
These notes combine material from short lecture courses given in Paris, France, in July 2001 and in Srni, the Czech Republic, in January 2003. They discuss groups of symplectomorphisms of closed symplectic manifolds (M,\om) from various…
This paper is based on a course given by the author at the University of Rome ``La Sapienza'' in the Academic year 2000/2001. The intended aim of the course was to rapidly introduce, although not in an exhaustive way, the non-expert PhD…
This is a slightly edited version of the transparencies for a seminar at UCL, May 7, 2003. It is intended to give a quick view of background, ideas, and some calculations, in the applicatioon of some non commutative methods to algebraic…
This is an introductory text on the more topological aspects of contact geometry, written for the Handbook of Differential Geometry vol. 2. After discussing (and proving) some of the fundamental results of contact topology (neighbourhood…
In this article, we study the topology of real analytic germs $F \colon (\C^3,0) \to (\C,0)$ given by $F(x,y,z)=\overline{xy}(x^p+y^q)+z^r$ with $p,q,r \in \N$, $p,q,r \geq 2$ and $(p,q)=1$. Such a germ gives rise to a Milnor fibration…