COURSE DESCRIPTION
Contact isotopies. Gray stability, Darboux, and Legendrian neighborhood theorems. Connections between contact and symplectic geometry. Geometry of hypersurfaces. Tight contact structures and Bennequin's inequality. Applications of Bishop disk fillings. Giroux flexibility. Eliashberg's proof of Cerf's theorem. Connect sum decompositions of tight contact manifolds. Classification of overtwisted contact structures. Legendrian knots. As time allows confoliation theory and/or topics from high dimensional contact geometry will be covered.
Text Book: No official text, but Geiges' book is an excellent resource that covers most of the topics discussed. There will also be class notes.
RECENT UPDATE
[01.01.2010] Welcome to the spring semester!
