This is the homepage for the 2021 Summer Minicourses, a series of week-long graduate student-run minicourses at UT Austin.
This summer, the minicourses are being organized by Arun Debray, Amy Li, Saad Slaoui, and Richard Wong. You can contact us at SMC.Organizers@gmail.com.
What are summer minicourses?
Minicourses focus on tools, methods, and ideas that aren't usually covered in prelims but are useful in topics classes/research. The idea is that a week-long minicourse will remain engaging, be easier to schedule, and help provide focus. These courses are primarily for graduate students, but all are welcome to participate!
Past courses have included:
- Review of classes that were taught in previous years.
- Primers for classes that will be taught next year.
- Examples of useful computational tools.
- Introductions to a subject/research area.
This week's courses
Introduction to contact topology
Speakers: Hannah Turner and Kai Nakamura
Where and When: July 12–16, 2–4PM CDT, except on Monday, when the course is 11AM–1PM CDT. Zoom link available in the Slack channel.
Abstract. This course will introduce basic examples and properties of contact structures on manifolds, especially 3-dimensional ones. Broadly, our goal is to discuss how contact geometric questions can be answered by studying knots and surfaces, especially highlighting where contact theoretic questions can be studied by topological techniques. In particular, we'll use these ideas to study the dichotomy: tight vs. overtwisted.
These courses were inspired in large part by the ones held at University of Michigan, which were started by Takumi Murayama.
You can click here to be added to the email list and click here to join the Slack channel.