Title: The second term in knot Floer homology Abstract:  It is well known that the genus g of a knot is the highest Alexander grading for which the knot Floer homology is nontrivial. In recent years, there is evidence suggesting that the knot Floer homology is also nontrivial in the Alexander grading g-1. In this talk, I

Title: Some Link Detection ResultsAbstract: A central question in low dimensional topology is; how can we distinguish links? In this talk I will discuss various classical invariants which can help us do so, as well as the stronger invariant Knot Floer homology and, time permitting, annular Khovanov homology. Indeed, we will see that these latter

Abstract: Cagri will talk about some symplectic/contact topological aspects of Brieskorn singularities $x^p+y^q+z^r=0$. He’ll tell how to draw the surgery diagrams of their canonical contact structures and prove that the Milnor fiber $M(p,q,r)$ symplectically embeds into $M(p’,q’,r’)$ whenever $p\leq p’$, $q\leq q’$, and $r\leq r’$ by explicitly constructing a Stein cobordism between corresponding canonical contact