Department Colloquium

Department Colloquium

Department of Mathematics
Princeton University

April 4th, 2001

Holomorphic disks and invariants for 3-manifolds and smooth 4-manifolds

We will introduce and study topological invariants for closed 3-manifolds and smooth 4-manifolds. The 3-manifold construction uses Heegaard diagrams and a version of Lagrangian Floer homology. The 4-manifold invariant uses the previous construction, a pairing on Floer-homology and a handle decomposition of the 4-manifold. We will also present some applications in three and 4-manifold topology. This is a joint result with Peter Ozsvath.