AWM/Math Club Colloquium: Caitlin Leverson (Bard College)
Event date: Thursday, April 17, 2025
“A Friendly Introduction to Lagrangian Realizations of Ribbon Cobordisms”
On Thursday, April 17, 2025, we are excited to host the second AWM/Math Club Colloquium by Professor Caitlin Leverson, a topologist from Bard College, at 3:45 PM in New Cabell 058. The talk is intended to be accessible to undergraduates.
Abstract: A knot is an embedding of the circle into a space, which can be thought of as a piece of string that has been tied up and then had the ends glued together. Given two knots, a ribbon cobordism is a particularly nice surface with the two knots as its boundary (think the two circles that are at the boundary of a cylinder). Much work has been done to study these surfaces in the smooth topological setting. However, what happens when we add some geometric conditions and study knots and surfaces in what is called a contact or symplectic manifold? It has long been known that every smooth knot has a Legendrian representative (knot which satisfies some extra geometric conditions). In this talk we will discuss why an analogous statement is true for ribbon cobordisms. Along the way we will give a brief introduction to smooth knots, ribbon cobordisms, Legendrian knots, and Lagrangian cobordisms. This is joint work with John Etnyre.
Last updated: Tuesday, April 8, 2025