Abstract 

Understanding the landscape of contact structures on spheres is a foundamental question in contact topology. In this talk, I will explain the joint work with Bowden, Gironella and Moreno on exotic contact spheres: the construction of tight contact spheres without fillings and exactly fillable contact spheres without Weinstein fillings. I will also discuss the effect of implementing such contact spheres on other contact manifolds through the contact connected sum.

About the speaker 

I am a faculty member at the Morningside Center of Mathematics and the Institute of Mathmatics of AMSS, CAS. I graduated from UC Berkeley under the supervision of Professor Katrin Wehrheim. After that, I spent 3 years as a postdoctoral member at the Institute for Advanced Study working with Professor Helmut Hofer.

I am interested in symplectic topology, more specifically, symplectic field theory and its applications to symplectic cobordism categories. Recently, I grew interest in symplectic and contact orbifolds, which could be very useful even if one only cares about symplectic and contact manifolds.

https://sites.google.com/view/zhengyizhou/