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SUMMARY:Contact geometry\, open books and monodromy - John Etnyre\, Georgi
 a Institute of Technology
DTSTART:20110608T150000Z
DTEND:20110608T160000Z
UID:TALK30304@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Ivan Smith
DESCRIPTION:Recall that an open book decomposition of a 3-manifold M is a 
 link L in M whose complement fibers over the circle with fiber a Seifert s
 urface for L. Giroux's correspondence relates open book decompositions of 
 a manifold M to contact structures on M. This correspondence has been fund
 amental to our understanding of contact geometry. An intriguing question r
 aised by this correspondence is how geometric properties of a contact stru
 cture are reflected in the monodromy map describing the open book decompos
 ition. In this talk I will show that there are several interesting monoids
  in the mapping class group that are related to various properties of a co
 ntact structure (like being Stein fillable\, weakly fillable\, etc). I wil
 l also show that there are open book decompositions of Stein fillable cont
 act structures whose monodromy cannot be factored as a product of positive
  Dehn twists. This is joint work with Jeremy Van Horn-Morris and Ken Baker
 .
LOCATION:MR13
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