Speaker: Will Kazez.
Title: Tight Contact Structures and Taut Foliations.
Affiliation: University of Georgia.
Date: Friday, 7 February 2003.
Place and Time: Room 101 - Love Building, 3:35-4:30 pm.
Refreshments: Room 204 - Love Building, 3:00 pm.

Abstract. A contact structure is a non-integrable selection of 2-planes in the tangent bundle of a 3-manifold. That is, it is precisely the opposite of a foliation. I'll discuss parallels in the development of contact topology and foliation theory with an emphasis on existence theorems. The techniques involve low-tech cut and paste topology, and the talk will be accessible to graduate students.