Thursday March 1, 4:00PM, Herman Brown 227
A few years ago Emmanuel Giroux made an amazing discovery showing a correspondence between an inherently topological structure, that is open book decompositions (up to some equivalence), to an inherently geometry object, that is a contact structure (up to some equivalence). This beautiful correspondence has been the key to countless advances in contact geometry and low dimensional topology ever sense. In this talk I will try to give a good feeling for open book decompositions and then discuss this correspondence. With this background we will then discuss invariants of contact structures arising form open books decompositions and see what they tell us about contact structures.