A central theme in Riemannian geometry is understanding the relationships between the curvature and the topology of a Riemannian manifold. Positive isotropic curvature (PIC) is a natural and much studied curvature condition which includes manifolds with pointwise quarter-pinched sectional curvatures and manifolds with positive curvature operator. We will give a survey of results on PIC and discuss recent joint work with J. Wolfson on fundamental groups of manifolds of PIC. The techniques used involve minimal surfaces.

In this talk, I will examine the geometry of moduli spaces of stable bundles on Hopf and Kodaira surfaces, which are compact complex surfaces that do not admit Kaehler metrics. In particular, I will show that these moduli admit interesting geometric structures such as hypercomplex structures and strong HKT-metrics, in the case of Hopf surfaces, as well as algebraic integrable systems.

Starting with a surface with negative constant Gauss curvature in the Euclidean 3-space, it is possible to (nontrivially) generate an infinitude of such surfaces by solving ODE systems alone. This fact, established by Bäcklund in the late 19th century, is one of the earliest-known examples of a Bäcklund transformation. The past century has seen rich interplay between Bäcklund transformations, integrable systems and soliton theory. However, a classification of Bäcklund transformations remains largely unknown. In this talk, I will discuss some recent progress on the classification of certain types Bäcklund transformations.

The Yamabe invariant of a closed manifold appears naturally when studying the total scalar curvature functional on the space of Riemannian metrics on the manifold. Computations are difficult, in particular in the positive case (when the manifold admits metrics of positive scalar curvarture, and there is no unicity of metrics of constant scalar curvature on a conformal class). In this talk I will review a little of what is known about the computation of the invariant and discuss some recent joint work with K. Akutagawa and L. Florit on the Yamabe constants of Riemannian products.

Heegaard Floer homology has different extensions for 3-manifolds with boundary. In this talk, we will recall some basics of these extensions and explain how they can be used to give a computationally effective way for detecting boundary parallel components of tangles, and existence of homologically essential compressing disks. The fact that these are checkable by computer, is based on the factoring algorithm of Lipshitz-Ozsvath-Thurston for computing bordered Floer homology, and our extension of it to compute bordered-sutured Floer homology. This is joint work with Robert Lipshitz.

Knot invariants can be defined using Legendrian isotopy invariants of the knot conormal. There are two types of invariants raised in this way: one is the knot contact differential graded algebra together with augmentations associated to this dga, and the other one is the category of simple sheaves microsupported along the knot conormal. The Nadler-Zaslow correspondence suggests a connection between the two types of invariants. In this talk, I will manifest an explicit map between augmentations and simple sheaves.

We characterize logarithmic pairs which admit K\"ahler-Einstein metrics with negative scalar curvature and small cone-edge singularities along a simple normal crossing divisor. We show that if such K\"ahler-Einstein metrics exist for all small cone-angles then they exist for all angles in a fixed range depending on the dimension only. Remarkably, the existence of such a uniform range can be used to derive many interesting results in hyperbolic geometry. We give effective bounds on the number of cusped complex hyperbolic manifolds with given upper bound on the volume. We estimate the number of ends of such manifolds in terms of their volume. Finally, we discuss the projective algebraicity of minimal compactifications (Siu-Yau) of finite volume complex hyperbolic manifolds.

I'll describe a new combinatorial method for computing the delta-graded knot Floer homology of a link in S^3. Our construction comes from iterating an unoriented skein exact triangle discovered by Manolescu, and yields a chain complex for knot Floer homology which is reminiscent of that of Khovanov homology, but is generated (roughly) by spanning trees of the black graph of the link. This is joint work with Adam Levine.

In 1982 Calabi proposed studying gradient flow of the L^2 norm of the scalar curvature (now called "Calabi flow") as a tool for finding canonical metrics within a given Kahler class. The main motivating conjecture behind this flow (due to Calabi-Chen) asserts the smooth long time existence of this flow with arbitrary initial data. By exploiting aspects of the Mabuchi-Semmes-Donaldson metric on the space of Kahler metrics I will construct a kind of weak solution to this flow, known as a minimizing movement, which exists for all time.

I will tell two stories. The first is the story of static spacetimes with black hole boundaries and the attempt to classify them. The second is the story of the Penrose inequality. I will then weave these two stories together in the setting of negative curvature. This last part is a report on joint work-in-progress with A. Neves.

This is joint work with Mike Sullivan. We consider a Legendrian surface, $L$, in $R^5$ (or more generally in the 1-jet space of a surface). Such a Legendrian can be conveniently presented via its front projection which is a surface in $R^3$ that is immersed except for certain standard singularities. We associate a differential graded algebra (DGA) to $L$ by starting with a cellular decomposition of the base projection (to $R^2$) of $L$ that contains the projection of the singular set of $L$ in its 1-skeleton. A collection of generators is associated to each cell, and the differential is determined in a formulaic manner by the nature of the singular set above the boundary of a cell. Our motivation is to give a cellular computation of the Legendrian contact homology DGA of $L$. In this setting, the construction of Legendrian contact homology was carried out by Etnyre-Ekholm-Sullvan with the differential defined by counting holomorphic disks in $C^2$ with boundary on the Lagrangian projection of $L$. Equivalence of our DGA with LCH may be established using work of Ekholm on gradient flow trees. Time permitting, we will discuss constructions of augmentations of the cellular DGA from two parameter families of functions.

A couple of years ago Kronheimer and I revisited our work on instantons with codimension two singularities. This leads to knot invariants associated to each partial flag manifold. There invariants are related to Khovanov homology for the case of $\IP1$ and Khovanov-Rozansky homology fo $\IP^n$. We have recently understood how to use the $\IP1$ case to prove that Khovanov homology detects the unknot.

I'll discuss how one can use cotangent and conormal bundles to translate some basic questions in topology into questions in symplectic geometry. This symplectic viewpoint allows one, for instance, to (re)prove that certain smooth structures on spheres are exotic, and to define new knot invariants via holomorphic curves. I'll describe properties of the knot invariant and some recent applications to transverse knots in contact geometry.

We introduce a new tool for relating the scalar curvature of a Riemannian manifold to its global geometry and topology, based on the study of level sets of harmonic functions and harmonic maps to the circle. We will explain how these ideas lead to simple new proofs and improvements upon some well-known results in three-manifold geometry and general relativity, previously studied primarily via minimal surface and Dirac operator methods.

A closed G2-structure is a certain type of geometric structure on a 7-manifold M, given by a 'non-degenerate' closed 3-form. The local geometry of closed G2-structures is non-trivial, in contrast to the perhaps more familiar case of symplectic structures (where we instead have a non-degenerate closed 2-form). In particular, any closed G2-structure automatically induces a Riemannian metric on M. I will talk about a special class of closed G2-structures, those satisfying a further 'quadratic' condition. This is a second order PDE system first written down by Bryant that can be interpreted as a condition on the Ricci curvature of the induced metric. I will focus mainly on the case where the G2-structure is 'extremally Ricci-pinched', giving new examples and describing an unexpected relationship with maximal submanifolds in a certain negatively curved pseudo-Riemannian symmetric space.

I will discuss recent advances in the theory of Fano varieties over nonclosed fields (joint with B. Hassett, A. Kresch, and A. Pirutka).

A smooth knot in a contact 3-manifold is called Legendrian if it is always tangent to the contact planes. In this talk, I will discuss Legendrian knots in R^3 and the solid torus where knots can be conveniently viewed using their `front projections'. In particular, I will describe how certain decompositions of front projections known as `normal rulings' (introduced by Fuchs and Chekanov-Pushkar) can be used to give combinatorial descriptions for parts of the HOMFLY-PT and Kauffman polynomials. I will conclude by discussing recent generalizations to Legendrian solid torus links. It is usual to identify the `HOMFLY-PT skein module' of the solid torus with the ring of symmetric functions. In this context, normal rulings can be used to give a knot theory description of the standard scalar product determined by taking the Schur functions to form an orthonormal basis.

Khovanov homology and knot Floer homology are two knot invariants which are defined using very different techniques, with Khovanov homology having its roots in representation theory and knot Floer homology in symplectic geometry. However, they seem to contain a lot of the same topological data about knots. Rasmussen conjectured that this similarity stems from a spectral sequence from Khovanov homology to knot Floer homology. In this talk I will give a construction of this spectral sequence. The construction utilizes a recently defined knot homology theory HFK_2 which provides a framework in which the two theories can be related.

We define an explicit quasi-local mass functional which is nondecreasing along all foliations of a null cone (satisfying a convexity assumption). We use this new functional to prove the Null Penrose Conjecture under fairly generic conditions.

The Chern-Simons invariants are 3-manifold invariants arising from representations of the fundamental group into a Lie group G. These have been well-studied for G = SU(2), but much less is known about them for more general G. In this talk, I will review the definition of these invariants and discuss results that extend to arbitrary compact G several well-known SU(2)-computations. These extensions all have the flavor of "if you know the invariants for SU(2), then you know the invariants for general compact G". This is joint work with Kevin Fournier.

Nakajima quiver varieties lie at the interface of geometry and representation theory and provide an important class of examples of Calabi-Yau manifolds. I will discuss a particular instance, hyperpolygon space, which arises from a certain shape of quiver. The simplest of these is a noncompact complex surface admitting the structure of an "instanton", and therefore fits nicely into the Kronheimer-Nakajima classification of ALE hyperkaehler 4-manifolds, which is a geometric realization of the McKay correspondence for finite subgroups of SU(2). For more general hyperpolygon spaces, we can speculate on how this classification might be extended by studying the geometry of hyperpolygons at "infinity". This talk represents previous work with Jonathan Fisher and ongoing work with Hartmut Weiss.

I shall discuss a variational problem arising from the study of quasilocal energy in general relativity. Given a spacelike 2-surface in spacetime, the Euler-Lagrange equation for the quasilocal energy is the isometric embedding equation into the Minkowski space coupled with a fourth order nonlinear elliptic equation for the time function. This equation is important in that it gives the ground configuration in GR. In joint work with PoNing Chen and Shing-Tung Yau, we solved this system in the cases of large and small sphere limits.

Thinking of high dimensional cubes as large cellular complexes, we pose the question of finding for each cellular cycle, a small cellular chain which bounds it. We will describe an algorithm which solves this problem. The algorithm is based on a trichotomy which describes the different ways cycles can sit in a cube. We will give examples of large topological spheres which are cellularly embedded in the cubes in a purely combinatorial way. These cycles will show that the exponent obtained by our algorithm is sharp.

We'll review the quantum sl_n knot invariants and their description via MOY calculus, as well as work of Cautis-Kamnitzer-Licata-Morrison showing how these invariants arise naturally from a duality between sl_n and sl_m called skew Howe duality. We'll then discuss work (joint with Aaron Lauda and Hoel Queffelec) categorifying this result to give elementary constructions of Khovanov and Khovanov-Rozansky knot homology. Time permitting, we'll also discuss work (joint with Daniel Tubbenhauer) relating symmetric Howe duality to the colored Jones polynomial, and giving a new diagrammatic method for computing this invariant.

A petal diagram of a knot or link consists of a center point surrounded by n non-nested loops; it represents n strands of the link at various heights which all project onto the same center point. Though every knot has a petal diagram, extremely few links have petal diagrams. The goal of this project is to characterize and enumerate which links do. First, we tabulate all petal links of 2-5 components. We then show all petal links arise as circle graphs -- the intersection graph of a set of chords of a circle. This establishes lower bounds on the number of petal links and allows us to conjecture upper bounds. We then discuss using petal diagrams to model certain classes of knots and links.

Weinstein manifolds are an important class of symplectic manifolds with convex ends/boundary. These 2n dimensional manifolds come with a retraction onto a core n-dimensional stratified complex called the skeleton, which generally has singularities. The topology of the skeleton does not generally determine the smooth or symplectic structure of the 2n dimensional Weinstein manifold. However, if the singularities fall into a simple enough class (Nadler’s arboreal singularities), the whole Weinstein manifold can be recovered just from the data of the n-dimensional complex. We discuss work in progress showing that every Weinstein manifold can be homotoped to have a skeleton with only arboreal singularities (focusing in low-dimensions). Then we will discuss some of the expectations and hopes for what might be done with these ideas in the future.