Low-Dimensional and Symplectic Topology (Proceedings of Symposia in Pure Mathematics)

Every eight years since 1961, the University of Georgia has hosted a major international topology conference aimed at disseminating important recent results and bringing together researchers at different stages of their careers. This volume contains the proceedings of the 2009 conference, which includes survey and research articles concerning such areas as knot theory, contact and symplectic topology, 3-manifold theory, geometric group theory, and equivariant topology. Among other highlights of the volume, a survey article by Stefan Friedl and Stefano Vidussi provides an accessible treatment of their important proof of Taubes' conjecture on symplectic structures on the product of a 3-manifold and a circle, and an intriguing short article by Dennis Sullivan opens the door to the use of modern algebraic-topological techniques in the study of finite-dimensional models of famously difficult problems in fluid dynamics. Continuing what has become a tradition, this volume contains a report on a problem session held at the conference, discussing a variety of open problems in geometric topology.