Invariants of Knots, Embeddings and Immersions via Contact Geometry
Joint work with Tobias Ekholm.
To appear in the proceedings of the ``Fields-McMaster Conference on Geometry and Topology of Manifolds''.

This paper is an overview of the idea of using contact geometry to construct invariants of immersions and embeddings. In particular, it discusses how to associate a contact manifold to any manifold and a Legendrian submanifold to an embedding or immersion. We then discuss recent work that creates invariants of immersions and embeddings using the Legendrian contact homology of the associated Legendrian submanifold.

You may download a compressed postscript or a pdf version of this paper.
You may download the version of this paper at the arxiv.