Project Details
Projekt
Foliations and contact structures
Subject Area
Mathematics
Term
from 2014 to 2018
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 262521153
The goal of this project is to improve our understanding of the relationship between contact structures and foliations on closed 3-dimensional manifolds. Both structures are given in terms of plane fields with certain geometric properties. While it is known, due to work of Eliashberg and Thurston, that any foliation, with one exception, can be approximated by contact structures and after work of T. Vogel it is also known under which conditions the foliation determines the contact structures up to isotopy, many questions remain open. We want to -find interesting sufficient conditions on tight contact structures which imply that the contact structure can be obtained by approximation of a taut foliation, and - describe how the topology of the space of contact structures changes when one adds taut foliations or confoliations.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
