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Lagrangian Fillings of Legendrian links--how learning some physics paid off for me

Mathematical Physics Seminar

Speaker: Roger Casals, UC Davis
Location: Meeting ID: 951 6481 0258
Start time: Fri, Feb 19 2021, 11:00AM

This term we focus on "Inspiration from Physics to Mathematics." The speaker's abstract:

In line with the theme of this quarter "Inspiration from Physics to Mathematics", I will explain how a piece of theoretical physics, mirror symmetry, has helped me solving a problem in 3-dimensional contact topology and boosted some of the recent developments in the field. The first part of the talk will review the basic definitions, motivations and statement of the questions. Then, I will guide you through my thought process -- borrowing ideas and intuitions from theoretical physics -- and the subsequent resolution of the infinitely many fillings question for links in the standard contact 3-sphere. Namely, I will explain why I initially believed that most Legendrian links should have infinitely many fillings, and how that inspiration from physics was translated into rigorous mathematics.



The Zoom Meeting Room opens at 10:45am. The meeting is passcode protected. The passcode is the pseudo-TeX form of the standard symplectic form of the oriented xy-plane, using ^ in place of wedge. Thus it consists of 7 characters.