3. Postdoctoral Program - MSRI

Final Report
MSRI Graduate Summer Workshop
Symplectic and contact geometry and topology
August 2009
Organizers:
J. Etnyre (Georgia Institute of Technology)
D. McDuff (Barnard College)
The goal of this workshop was to introduce a diverse group of students to most of the basic tools
used in symplectic and contact geometry and topology, as well as to introduce some of the driving
questions that motivate the field today. To accomplish this we had:
1. six lecture series, two of them concerning symplectic geometry — an introductory lecture
series by Margaret Symington (Mercer University) and a series on capacities and symplectic
packing by Dusa McDuff (Columbia University); two of them concerning contact geometry —
an introductory lecture series by John Etnyre (Georgia Institute of Technology) and a series
of lectures on contact homology by Lenny Ng (Duke University); and two of them concerning
holomorphic curve techniques in symplectic and contact geometry — an introductory lecture
series by Katrin Wehrheim (MIT) and a series on Floer homology by Ely Kerman (UIUC).
2. question/problem sessions where students could ask the lecturers further questions about
the material from the lecture series. Following these questions the lecturers would choose 3-5
problems for the students to work on in groups.
3. break out sessions where students with weaker backgrounds could meet with the lecturers
and TA’s to have questions answered about more basic material (in the first week).
4. four, one hour talks to give a brief introduction to other topics (in the second week). Three
of these talks were on Lagrangian Floer theory, Lagrangian correspondences and quilts, and
quantum homology and Gromov–Witten invariants, and given by, respectively, Mark Branson,
Sikimeti Ma’u and Dusa McDuff. (The first two of these speakers were also TAs for the
program.) The fourth talk was on applications of symplectic geometry and was given by
three people Ely Kerman, Sean Fitzgerald (a student in the workshop) and Misha Entov.
The topics for these talks were suggested by the more advanced students.
5. a capstone meeting at the very end of the program, where various topics that were missed
during the program could be discussed and where some of the more advanced students could
present their work to everyone. The students that made presentations were Sean Fitzgerald
(on geometric quantization), Jonathan Yazinski (on constructions of symplectic 4-manifolds)
and Doug LaFountain (Legendrian classification of iterated torus knots).
In addition to the activities specifically planned for the workshop, the last day of the workshop
overlapped with the Connections workshop for the Symplectic and Contact Geometry program, and
the activities for the two workshops were coordinated during the morning sessions. This allowed
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