Announcements
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May 1–4, 2009 for next year's festival.
Archive
Abstracts of Workshops
Hansjörg Geiges, University of Cologne
Contact 3-Manifolds and Geometric Topology
I shall survey the status of various classification questions in 3-dimensional contact topology, describe structure theorems for contact 3-manifolds, and discuss applications of these results to geometric topology.
Katrin Wehrheim, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Introduction to Floer Theory for Lagrangian Submanifolds
I will introduce the (symplectic) Floer homology for pairs of Lagrangian submanifolds. It is invariant under Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms and provides bounds on the number of intersection points. In a special case, Floer introduced this invariant to prove the Arnold conjecture. It is based on counts of holomorphic strips with boundary values in the Lagrangian submanifolds. I will point out the essential obstructions and analytic difficulties and give the easiest sufficient conditions (on compactness, monotonicity, and Maslov index) under which the theory is well defined.