COLLOQUIUM
Invariants of Legendrian
Graphs
Dr. Elena Pavelescu
Visiting Assistant Professor
Occidental College
Abstract
A contact structure on a 3-manifold is an everywhere nonintegrable 2-plane field. A Legendrian graph in a contact structure
is a graph embedded in such a way that its edges are everywhere
tangent to the contact planes. Legendrian graphs have appeared in
important theorems in contact topology, such as the Giroux’s
correspondence and the classification of the Legendrian unknot. In
this talk, after a brief introduction to contact topology, we will
define two invariants of Legendrian graphs (the ThurstonBennequin number and the rotation number) and we will answer a
realizability question about these invariants.
Department of
Mathematics
Friday,
March 2nd, 2012
4:00 p.m.
204 Morgan Hall
Refreshments will be
served at 3:45 p.m.