Home /  Getting dirty with foliations: Building foliations from contact crumbs

Seminar

Getting dirty with foliations: Building foliations from contact crumbs May 15, 2026 (02:00 PM PDT - 04:00 PM PDT)
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Location: SLMath: Eisenbud Auditorium, Online/Virtual
Speaker(s) Thomas Massoni (Stanford University)
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Foliations and contact structures are by definition very different objects, lying on opposite extremes of the integrability spectrum. However, Eliashberg and Thurston proved in their breakthrough work that aspherical foliations in dimension 3 can always be approximated by contact structures; think of it as maximally crumbling puff pastry. During my PhD, I proved a converse result on the construction of foliations from suitable (pairs of) contact structures. This is like reconstructing the puff pastry from its contact crumbs! In this talk, I will present some key ideas behind this construction, and discuss some resulting flexibility phenomena for taut foliations.

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