4 papers · 1 filter
Monodromy, vanishing cycles, knots and the adjoint quotient
Ivan Smith
These are notes from lectures given at the Clay Institute Summer School on "Floer homology, gauge theory and low-dimensional topology" (Budapest, 2004). The first part describes as…
The symplectic topology of Ramanujam's surface
Paul Seidel, Ivan Smith
Ramanujam's surface M is a contractible affine algebraic surface which is not homeomorphic to the affine plane. For any m>1 the product M^m is diffeomorphic to Euclidean space R^{4…
A link invariant from the symplectic geometry of nilpotent slices
Paul Seidel, Ivan Smith
Using the symplectic geometry of certain manifolds which appear naturally in Lie theory, we define an invariant which assigns a graded abelian group to an oriented link. The releva…
Lefschetz pencils, branched covers and symplectic invariants
Denis Auroux, Ivan Smith
This set of lectures aims to give an overview of Donaldson's theory of linear systems on symplectic manifolds and the algebraic and geometric invariants to which they give rise. Af…