The Langlands program is a far-reaching collection of conjectures that relate different areas of mathematics including number theory and representation theory. A fundamental problem on the representation theory side of the Langlands program is the construction of all (irreducible, smooth, complex) representations of certain matrix groups, called p-adic groups. In my talk I will introduce p-adic groups and provide an overview of our understanding of their representations, with an emphasis on recent progress. I will also briefly discuss applications to other areas, e.g. to automorphic forms and the global Langlands program.

The Heegaard Floer package provides a robust tool for studying contact 3-manifolds and their subspaces. Within the sphere of Heegaard Floer homology, several invariants of Legendrian and transverse knots have been defined. The first such invariant, constructed by Ozsvath, Szabo and Thurston, was defined combinatorially using grid diagrams. The second invariant was obtained by geometric means using open book decompositions by Lisca, Ozsvath, Stipsicz and Szabo. We show that these two previously defined invariant agree. Along the way, we define a third, equivalent Legendrian/transverse invariant which arises naturally when studying transverse knots which are braided with respect to an open book decomposition.

We consider the question: ``How bad can the deformation space of an object be?'' (Alternatively: ``What singularities can appear on a moduli space?'') The answer seems to be: ``Unless there is some a priori reason otherwise, the deformation space can be arbitrarily bad.'' We show this for a number of important moduli spaces. More precisely, up to smooth parameters, every singularity that can be described by equations with integer coefficients appears on moduli spaces parameterizing: smooth projective surfaces (or higher-dimensional manifolds); smooth curves in projective space (the space of stable maps, or the Hilbert scheme); plane curves with nodes and cusps; stable sheaves; isolated threefold singularities; and more. The objects themselves are not pathological, and are in fact as nice as can be. This justifies Mumford's philosophy that even moduli spaces of well-behaved objects should be arbitrarily bad unless there is an a priori reason otherwise. I will begin by telling you what ``moduli spaces'' and ``deformation spaces'' are. The complex-minded listener can work in the holomorphic category; the arithmetic listener can think in mixed or positive characteristic. This talk is intended to be (mostly) comprehensible to a broad audience.