Mathematics Colloquia and Seminars

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Given a closed, connected 3-manifold M, when can we say that M supports a tight contact structure? In this talk, I will survey what is known about this question, and talk about work in the direction of answering a weaker question: does at least one of M and -M support a tight contact structure? We will consider manifolds arising from surgery on fibred knots, and make use of Heegaard Floer homology and its interactions with open book decompositions. Time permitting, I will give some ideas toward answering the classification question for tight contact structures.