Knot graphs and Gromov hyperbolicity

We define a broad class of graphs that generalize the Gordian graph of knots. These knot graphs take into account unknotting operations, the concordance relation, and equivalence relations generated by knot invariants. We prove that overwhelmingly, the knot graphs are not Gromov hyperbolic, with the exception of a particular family of quotient knot graphs. We also investigate the property of homogeneity, and prove that the concordance knot graph is homogeneous. Finally, we prove that that for any $n$, there exists a knot $K$ such that the ball of radius $n$ in the Gordian graph centered at $K$ contains no connected sum of torus knots

Relative Ruan and Gromov-Taubes Invariants of Symplectic 4-Manifolds

We define relative Ruan invariants that count embedded connected symplectic submanifolds which contact a fixed stable symplectic hypersurface V in a symplectic 4-manifold (X,w) at prescribed points with prescribed contact orders (in addition to insertions on X\V) for stable V. We obtain invariants of the deformation class of (X,V,w). Two large issues must be tackled to define such invariants: (1) Curves lying in the hypersurface V and (2) genericity results for almost complex structures constrained to make V pseudo-holomorphic (or almost complex). Moreover, these invariants are refined to take into account rim tori decompositions. In the latter part of the paper, we extend the definition to disconnected submanifolds and construct relative Gromov-Taubes invariants

Notes on bordered Floer homology

This is a survey of bordered Heegaard Floer homology, an extension of the Heegaard Floer invariant HF-hat to 3-manifolds with boundary. Emphasis is placed on how bordered Heegaard Floer homology can be used for computations.Comment: 73 pages, 29 figures. Based on lectures at the Contact and Symplectic Topology Summer School in Budapest, July 2012. v2: Fixed many small typo