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Geometry-Topology Seminar

Thursday, December 10, 2009 - 4:30pm

Clayton Shonkwiler

Haverford College

Location

University of Pennsylvania

DRL 4C8

When classifying Legendrian representatives of a given knot type, one needs to be able to distinguish those representatives which are nondestabilizable from those which are stabilized. Legendrian contact homology is a powerful, though complicated and poorly-understood, invariant which seems to make this distinction. I will discuss some of the properties of this invariant as well as some recent progress in understanding what it tells us about nondestabilizability.