Seminar| Institute of Mathematical Sciences
Time: Friday, June 05th, 2026,11:00-12:00
Location: IMS R408
Speaker: Shunyu Wan, Georgia Institute of Technology
Abstract:The existence and nonexistence of tight contact structures on 3-manifolds are interesting and important topics studied over the past thirty years. Etnyre-Honda found the first example of a 3-manifold that does not admit tight contact structures, and later Lisca-Stipsicz extended their result and showed that a Seifert fiber space admits a tight contact structure if and only if it is not smooth (2n-1)-surgery along the T(2,2n+1) torus knot for any positive integer n. Surprisingly, since then no other example of a 3-manifold without tight contact structures has been found. Hence, it is interesting to study if all such manifolds, except those mentioned above, admit a tight contact structure. Towards this goal, I will discuss the joint work with Zhenkun Li and Hugo Zhou about showing any negative surgeries on any knot in S^3 admit a tight contact structure.